It's Definitely Not All Mary Poppins

A Still House

The next hour was unnaturally quiet. Matthew got to work cleaning, scrubbing, and making notes of who to contact next concerning the estate. He still awaited the email from the Foundation, as well as Yang's response.

It was only when a sudden arrival of a giant plush sparkle unicorn off a truck that Matthew knew he shouldn't step in. By noon, Mr. Yang's muffled voice pleaded with his daughter, his nephew an apparent afterthought, behind their closed doors. Something inside him burned with a passion to see the man fail, to come crawling to him for his assistance. Something ached in him to help.

Matthew stayed away. He cleaned his employer's office for the first time in nearly a week.

By one, the house reeked of silence. Matthew ran lunches to the children.

Lilly and Elliot unlocked the doors, took the meals, and shut them without a word, though Elliot lingered before closing his. The girl's built-in desk had burst in a cartographic explosion; Eli's room reeked of sulfur and mint.

Yang was nowhere to be seen. His office sat empty, the door propped wide open. The sickly scent of cigar smoke bled through the door to the master suite.

Matthew only returned to the second floor to collect dishes and run dinners.

He'd never felt so unwelcome in a house before. The feeling was all too familiar to him, yet it was never this intense.

By nightfall, the house had settled into the hum of unease. Something within the plasterwork scuttled. An upstairs toilet struggled to flush, the pipes rattling. The roof ached, settling against the walls. The trees rustled, and, only faintly, the sound of running water padded through the open windows. Everywhere, Matthew's breath labored on, as if unable to accept the silence.

Matthew plugged in his headphone and blasted music while working at the kitchen island, planning the upcoming week's grocery list. But once the task was finished, and he'd moved on to research on electric car conversions, the more his stomach seemed to upend itself. Matthew was confident that he'd be fired.

A tug on his shirt brought him out of his train of thought.

Lilly, still dressed in her clothes from earlier, clutched the head of the plush sparkle unicorn.

Matthew pulled off his headphones, letting out the translucent smoke in a single breath. "O-oh. Hey..." he started, tapping out the cigarette against the island's faded linoleum counter; his hands continued to shake. "Sorry."

She slid into the chair beside him, plopping the stuffed head on the counter.

"...what happened to, uh..."

"Eli cut his head off."

"Oh."

"... it's okay because..." She trailed off, eyes fixed to the nose of the decapitated stuffed animal's face. Lilly finally glanced up, catching sight of the lingering smoke hanging around the lights before turning to the stubbed cigarette. "What're you doing?"

Matthew took in a breath. He didn't answer.

"You smell like Dad."

"...I know."

Lilly turned to her nanny. "Matt, is what Eli said true? Did he say he'd fire you?"

Matthew glanced back towards the dining room, somehow hoping that he'd be seen, yet no one was in sight. The question, however...he wanted to deflect. There was no clear-cut way to explain the self-destruction to her. "Lilly, I can't...that's a tough question to answer."

"You've always answered my questions before. What makes this one different?" she asked.

Because it could jeopardize his position here. That is if he still had one by the end of the week. By the end of the day, even. "He didn't do anything."