All Hallows' Lease

Willa Grant, 27, is a broke second-year history MA student whose funding has run thin. On October 1st she signs a one-year lease on a small house on Brick Kiln Lane for four hundred dollars a month, half the going rate. Buried in the rider is a single strange clause: the tenant shall host the house's Halloween party, as is tradition, and shall remain in the house until the party ends. She signs. She needs the rent. October unfolds as a slow unmaking. The house knocks. Mail arrives for women who rented the house for years and left no trace in any record. Willa begins to remember a Halloween party in this house that she never attended, and finds a photograph to prove it. Her mother finally admits what the family cut out of every album: Willa's grandmother Evelyn rented a house near the Ridges in the early 1960s, and fled in the middle of the night in October 1964. Evelyn is the only tenant who ever got out. On Halloween night the guests arrive, twelve women in costume, kind and laughing, and every one of them is wearing the face of a previous tenant. At midnight her landlord sets an old Polaroid camera on the porch and explains the only rule the rider never stated: someone has to be in the photograph, and whoever is in it stays. Willa has until the flash to decide whose face goes in the frame, and her hand is already moving toward the pen.