The House of Memories Memories are like bullets, coming in all shapes and sizes and with unknown impacts. Some are empty, hitting the sky only as fine dust. Others dart around, only scaring you. But then there are the select few, who even when you wear armor, even when you are protected by walls of steel, will find a way to tear you apart and leave you in pieces. These bullets are the ones that, no matter how much time passes, no matter what happens in between, hit you deep into your bones, shake your entire structure, memories that stay with you forever. So, you can only be a blind soldier when entering the house of memories. Every memory – the fragments, the threads, the explosions – will be thrown at you. All you can do before taking to the field is put on your armor and helmet. You, soldier, created these memories, but not even the veterans of the House can accurately remember the force of the bullets of their memory. You come to a spiral staircase: smooth mahogany and cold to the touch. As you start to descend, time slows down and speeds up. The stairs themselves change: one moment, the too-narrow bricks of your first house, then the stained, jam-packed carpet of your junior high school. Your feet encounter the cracked cobblestone walkway of Shanghai, China, and then the rough clapboards of your grandparents' house. A sign engraved in small, precise letters reads: This is not a museum. You won't find license plates with descriptions that interpret the images; you will not be given answers. This is a house full of rooms and it's up to you to discover its heart. You see the first door. Seems harmless - chipped frame and all. You move the handle and put all your weight on the wood in front of it... in the center of the paper... it shatters. You slam the door to the room filled only with shards of glass, and your feet are already at the top of the stairs. And you're out of the house, out of the war zone. The first thing you want to do is participate in one of Grandpa's salt-and-pepper interrogations. The two of you together will be blind soldiers. And every time Mom comes looking for you, all she will see are two pairs of glowing eyes: one broken with the sharp edges of stars and sky and the other with shards of glass. Mom will know she has to leave. There's a girl running down our hallway with bullet holes in her shirt and fire starting to eat her scalp. But worse than the missing arm and singed hair, he has a house, but not a house, a chocolate ganache cake, but not a Carvel, a grandfather on a table instead of a chair, and a broken reflection.