There’s a room upstairs I could write in. A desk by the window, a little red chair. 

“It’s perfect,” my husband says, “so long as you remember not to shut the door.” 

That’s what the owners told us when we moved in. “But why?” I asked, until they showed me. 

They shut the door. The whole house shook. The room filled with a horrible, unyielding shriek. 

“So it’s haunted,” I told my husband. 

“Only if you don’t follow the rules.” 

We’re making room for the new baby. It’s obvious no one can sleep upstairs. 

“We’ll keep the nursery downstairs with us,” my husband says. “So you can use the upstairs room to write.” 

I sit at the desk in the scream-room while rain drips down the pipes. Hairless feral cats like to climb up on the roof of our garage. In my dreams they parade on their hind legs, bellies and teats rounded like a pregnant woman’s. Their bodies are slick with the rain; they are flagrant, joyful, up to no good. In the mornings I watch them from the window, think: maybe all that screaming was really just the howling of the cats. 

The baby is born. For months: chaos. Progress is a day I don’t lie down on the floor and weep. The baby’s body is so awfully foreign to me. I’m scared to touch her, not sure what I’ll see when I peel off her soiled onesies. “It’s just not what I thought a newborn baby would look like,” I tell my husband. So skinny and pale, little hands always creeping. 

One evening I take the baby up to the scream-room. She’ll like to see the cats, I think. When we enter her body tenses. By the time we reach the window she is crying. I unbutton my shirt but she won’t latch. I go into the hallway and walk back and forth, singing lullabies over her unceasing wails. 

This soon becomes a habit, this inconsolable crying. From Google my husband learns of the witching hour. “Around 5pm,” he reads, “some babies just cry for no reason.” 

I stand at the window in our kitchen, rocking the baby as she cycles through her now-familiar screams. Outside a harvest moon is rising, impossibly huge and orange. “Maybe,” I tell my husband, “she’s screaming to go back into the womb.” 

But the witching hour is a phase, like everything. By the baby’s third month she is plump and rosy. Soon she’s smiling, laughing, saying mama, dada. Before I know it I have forgotten her scrawny body, her constant crying, the way I used to count the days I didn’t cry myself. 

It’s summer now. The rains have stopped. The hairless cats curl up pink-bodied on the roof of our garage. My daughter’s napping; I have time to work. I go into the scream-room and hear my husband on the phone. His voice echoes up the hall confusedly, like a ghost with only memories of the office, mumbling cryptic curses about quarterly reports. I look down at my desk, the drafts in progress, the books I haven’t touched in months. Wasn’t this what I wanted, to transform? Outside a cat flicks her long pink tail. I watch her swallow down something soft and scurrying before I turn from the window and shut the door.