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"Maile," the female voice seemed to be coming from everywhere and nowhere when it called her name suddenly.
She was in the kitchen, cutting up a block of spam and shredding cheese for an omelet. She looked behind her first rather than answer right away. "Maile," there it was again. She stepped out of the kitchen and looked around the partition. No one in the living room. "Maile," the same tone, the same calm in the voice called her name again. She walked into the bathroom, the bedroom and stood outside on the porch fronting the door. Returning to the kitchen, she saw that the sliced spam and shredded cheese sat in the middle of the frying pan, sizzling on a low-temperature setting. The eggs she hadn't touched yet, were cracked, whisked, and blanketed over the spam and cheese. Deftly, she removed the frying pan from the eye and turned the heat off. Placing the contents of the frying pan on a paper plate, she turned the water on in the sink and put the pan there."Maile," the voice called again. This time she didn't leave the kitchen, nor did she answer because she knew better. Answering only invited them to do more. The television went on in the living room, and she heard the sound of someone taking a seat on the leather sofa. Calmly, she opened the cover to the switch box and turned off all the power in the house. She clearly heard a voice let out a disgusted sigh and heard someone get up from the couch. The television was back on again, and whoever it was that did it plopped themselves back down so significantly that she felt it shake the floor. "Maile," the voice called. Walking into the living room, she saw it was empty, no one sat on the couch, but the impression of a body sitting there was undeniable. She threw a plate at it, and it hit something that wasn't there with a kind of clinking thud, that it cracked on one side and fell on the couch. "Fucking shit!" That was more than she cared to endure. She burst out through the front door and ran until she was out on the street facing the house. She held it in the whole time, but now she let out more than just a blood-curdling scream. She let out a vocal volley of terror.
"Maile," the voice beckoned her. "Maile."
Without warning, the house exploded outwards as if it were holding on to something that exceeded its capacity to contain. It bent the vinyl sidings and melted the paint before shattering everything into a million splinters. The blast threw her clear into the neighbor's backyard, but she survived. An hour later, she sat in the back of an ambulance getting patched up by the EMT. The firefighters would later tell her that there was a subtle gas leak in the house. Also, the eye on the stove wasn't completely turned off, and they surmised that that could have been the cause of the explosion. Had she not left the house when she did, she would have been killed. "It's strange," she told the one firefighter. "This voice in my home kept calling, Maile, Maile."
"Someone was calling you?" The firefighter wanted to confirm.
"Someone was calling for Maile, but that's not my name," she answered. "My name is Lori."
photo credit: Lonerwolf
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