My Hallway Kept Getting Longer
It is the first night away from home, the bathroom is somewhere on a hallway that will not stop growing, and every door is towels.
12 pages · hardcover 8×8" (20×20cm)
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Every word, start to finish. The pictures come next — painted around your child, from one photo.
For Theo, who counted from the right end.
Dedication
The lights went off at nine, in a bed that faced the wrong way, in a room that smelled of somebody else's laundry soap. At eleven thirty Theo worked out he needed the bathroom.
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The hallway was longer than it had been at bedtime. Noticeably longer. Longer the way a road is longer than a driveway. Theo was fairly sure hallways did not do that. At home, they did not do that.
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Right. Count from the stairs. First door, second door, third door, and the third one is the bathroom.
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The first door was towels. The second door was more towels, stacked to the ceiling, in order of size. Somebody in this house was extremely serious about towels, and not at all serious about labeling doors.
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So he walked the whole length of it, flashlight out in front, touching each door on the way past.
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There were nine doors. On the way out there had been five. The hallway was growing behind him.
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Theo ran. Then Theo stopped running, because he could not find the room he had come out of either.
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He had been counting from the stairs. But he had not come from the stairs. He had come from a door.
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Theo went along the bottom of the doors with the flashlight until he found his own bag on the floor.
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From that door it was two along. It had been two along the whole time, humming quietly to itself, with the nightlight on, waiting to be counted from the right end.
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On the way back there was a light under one of the towel doors, and a pair of slippers outside it.
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Theo got back in. He left the door open exactly a hand's width, and the hallway stayed where it was put.
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