**Chapter 13: Exit Wounds**
392 Words
We didn’t walk out of the house.
We *rose* from it.
Not like superheroes (though Max insisted we struck a cool silhouette), but like people who’d been deep underground and finally remembered what sunlight felt like.
The front door stood open. Waiting.
No tricks.
No jumpscares.
No guilt confetti exploding in our faces.
Just grass, sky, and the weird sensation that we’d left something important behind—but gained something heavier and stranger in return.
Riley was the first to step out.
She blinked up at the sky like it owed her money. “Huh. Still blue.”
“Yeah,” Nate said. “Kinda disrespectful. I feel like the clouds should at least spell out *‘YOU SURVIVED’* or something.”
Amber followed next, stretching like she’d just finished a six-month workout. “I expected to feel... lighter.”
Zoe adjusted her backpack full of sketches. “Nope. This isn’t lighter. This is *realer.*”
Max held up his phone. “No signal. Classic. Either we time-traveled or the house killed our group chat.”
Then I stepped out.
And the door behind us—
**Shut.**
With a finality that wasn’t cruel or angry.
Just… done.
No explosion. No fanfare.
The house simply stopped being a house.
It *dissolved*, like it had never been real in the first place—just a psychic pressure valve in architectural form.
What remained was an empty lot and the feeling that the air had been scrubbed clean with lemon-scented therapy.
We stood there in silence.
Then Zoe asked the big one:
“…So now what?”
And we all laughed. Not because it was funny, but because it was honest.
**What *do* you do after surviving a sentient building full of metaphorical trauma goo and sarcastic furniture?**
You go back to school, apparently.
You turn in overdue homework.
You eat bad pizza.
You try to make eye contact with your parents and not flinch.
You dream strange dreams and text each other at 3 a.m. just to check that you’re all still real.
And slowly—
You start talking about it.
Not just the house, but everything.
The parts you hid.
The versions of you that cracked and reformed.
The weird ache that healing leaves behind.
Because the truth is...
**Some wounds don’t disappear.**
They just stop bleeding.
And maybe that’s enough.
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- Writer
