The Children's Hiding Place

Lyrics

That's my other name. The one they use upstairs.
Time to go.
I slip away from the Hallway Window Seat,
where the sun makes the dust dance like it's happy.
Down the grand stairs, two at a time, a whisper.
Past the Library door, sealed with the smell of sleeping words.
I don't look in. Not today.
I take the back stairs, the cold ones, down into the body of the house.
The basement breathes. A different kind of dark down here.
The Boiler Room is singing its low, iron song to itself.
I give the Furnace Corridor a wide berth, its mouth is a hot shadow.
That's where the dragon sleeps. I never wake the dragon.
One last turn, past the stacks of old newspapers that smell like forgotten rain.
And here. The loose board behind the canning shelves.
I pull it back. I cross the border. 
I am not a daughter here. I have no name here.
I am the queen of the small space, and the law of the quiet reign.
My kingdom is the space between the walls.
It smells of damp stone, and the clean, dry scent of spiders.
My treasures live in a biscuit tin from 1952.
A robin's egg, impossibly blue and empty.
A tin soldier with no gun, who won a war that never happened.
A piece of green glass that turns the sliver of light from the crack into a forest.
The quiet here is rough, like un-sanded wood held against your cheek.
I can listen to its texture for hours.
On the back of a crate, I drew a map of this whole house, a secret atlas.
Every room they live in is just a province, far away.
This place, this dark, is the capital. This is the throne.
I remember the day I declared my independence.
Or maybe I remember remembering it. The difference is gone.
Inside my biscuit tin there's a smaller, rust-hinged tin.
And inside that, a folded paper shows a drawing
of a girl in a dark space, holding a drawing of a girl.
Their feet walk across my ceiling.
So faint. So far.
Like the sound of a story happening somewhere else.
To someone else.