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it flips on and off pointlessly, no lights coming on anywhere. He turns from the stairs, not willing to brave the darkness of them just yet, not even really wanting to look at them, just gathering his courage before entering the living room.
    He takes a deep, dry breath, coughing again at the dust.
    And steps through the doorway.

It is as he left it. Scattered rays of sunlight are the only illumination, since the light switches don’t work in this room either. A room filled, he now fully realizes, with the furniture of his childhood.
    There are the stained red settees, one big, one small, that his father wasn’t going to replace until the boys got old enough not to mess them up anymore.
    Settees that got left behind in England when they moved to America, left behind in
this
house.
    But here is a coffee table that didn’t get left behind, a coffee table that should be thousands and thousands of miles from here.
    I don’t understand,
he thinks.
I don’t understand.
    He sees a vase of his mother’s that made the trip. He sees an ugly end table that didn’t. And there, above the mantelpiece –
    He feels the same stabbing in his gut despite knowing what to expect.
    It’s the painting made by his uncle, the painting that came to America, too, with some of this furniture. It’s of a shrieking, wrongly proportioned horse with terror in its eyes and that awful spike for its tongue. His uncle had patterned it after Picasso’s
Guernica,
surrounding the horse with broken skies and broken, bombed-out bodies.
    Seth had long since been told about the real
Guernica
by his father, long since understood the story behind it, but even though his uncle’s version was the palest of pale imitations, it was the first painting Seth had ever properly seen, the first real painting his then-five-year-old mind had tried to figure out. For that reason, it loomed larger for him than any classic ever would.
    It is something out of a nightmare, something horrible and hysterical, something unable to listen to reason or understand mercy.
    And it is a painting he last saw
yesterday,
if yesterday still means anything. If time passed at all in hell. Whatever the answer, it was a painting he saw on his way out of his own house on the other side of the world, the last thing his eyes had glanced over as he shut his front door.
    His actual front door. Not this. Not this nightmare version out of a past he’d prefer not to remember.
    He watches the painting as long as he can bear, long enough to try and turn it into just a painting, nothing more than that, but he can feel his heart thudding as he looks away from it, his eyes avoiding a dining-room table he also recognizes, and the bookcases full of books, some of whose titles he’s read in another country than this. He shuffles as quickly as his weak body will carry him into the kitchen, keeping his thoughts only on his thirst. He heads straight to the sink, almost whimpering with anticipated relief.
    When he turns on the taps and nothing happens, he lets out an involuntary cry of despair. He tries them again. One won’t move at all, and the other just spins in his hand, producing nothing, no matter how often he twists it.
    He can feel a weeping rising in him again, his eyes burning at how salty the tears are in his dehydrated body. He feels so weak, so unsteady that he has to lean forward and put his forehead against the counter, feeling its dusty coolness on his brow and hoping he won’t faint.
    Of course this is what hell would be like,
he thinks.
Of course it is. To always be thirsty but have nothing to drink. Of course.
    It’s probably punishment for the Baby Jesus thing. Monica had even said so. He feels a rueful flutter in his stomach, remembering that night again, remembering his friends, how relaxed and easy everything usually was, how they liked that he was the quiet one, how it hadn’t mattered that the differences in English and American curriculum meant that he was nearly a year younger