Those were strange days inside the house, a drama that was but one of countless in deathtraps across the country. The trio lived in the bleak reality of their own mindless decay.

She ambled about the house in a facsimile of her old life, only pausing to perform half-remembered chores in empty air, wearing a groove in the old wood floor. From a corner what remained of him scrabbled feebly—his legs spurs of bone and desiccated tendons—at her passing ankles. His fingers were gnawed to the bone, and the bones themselves worn smooth by ceaseless rakings across the floor.

They both would twitch when a perfunctory wail emitted from her distended belly, which bulged and shrank monstrously. A feeble arm dangled from a hole near the right lung; a leg was jammed well into the woman’s pelvis.

The windows, brightening and darkening, were their only indication of Time’s progress, if they still understood such a thing. When the vines, tree roots reclaimed the house, they were etiolated mummies in the clutch of nature.