PA-1977-089 · PRESENCE · 1977 · DEMONSTRATION
The Nightlight Hall
Roanoke, Virginia
Deposition
Fictional demonstration record. Not a genuine eyewitness account.
A boy, then seven; restated at thirty-one · Demonstration deposition
I was seven. The nightlight in the hall was the kind that looks like a seashell if you are seven. I heard my name the way my mother says it when she is not impatient. I got up. The hall was empty and the air felt busy, like a room after company has stood up and not yet gone.
I said good night to the hall. I felt I ought to. Nothing spoke again. In the morning I told my father and he said old houses settle, which is a sentence that has never once explained a name.
I am thirty-one as I write this. I do not have a childhood of terrors. I have this one clear thing: a name in the wood-paneled hall, and a boy who thought it polite to answer. If the Archives prefer a frightened child, they will have to look in another file. I was not frightened. I was included.
ALSO ON THIS HEADING
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