It’s not quite square, the little room. When she looks it over she mostly sees the flaws. But it’s her own.

Aldous found two brass numerals, backstage: the number that comes after twelve. She tacks them to her door to nowhere, and opens it, and leaves the house behind.

Aldous opens her burning eyes. The auditorium is empty. She is, as always, alone.

Backstage there are stacks of dusty pine, newspaper, buckets of nails; the thing about the theater is you’re always building something. It’ll take time to lug it up through her little trapdoor, but time she’s got.

One final thing her father showed her: you can’t just leave the house. You have to give it something. You have to build the last room yourself.

No note. No trace. No end to the questions, all these aching lost orphan years later, and finally she knows:

The end of the world’s not a girl or a dream.
The end of the world’s not a house.
The end of the world is the story you tell when your reasons for living run out.

Aniridia looks out at the auditorium and the dead filling its seats, quiet and still.  “I didn’t intend to,” she says.  “I want to go home.”

“Have you walked the maze?” The end of the world straightens from her sutures. “Have you named names and dug at the cracks? There’s no home for you anymore.”

“Dead dear fear feed fled,” Aniridia whispers, then grips the curtain, forcing glossolalia back down her throat.

“Which will you be?” she asks. “The end of the house?  Or the girl in the world?”

Is there an audience out there? Of whom or what would it be composed? She almost doesn’t want to look, but her father would admonish her for willful blindness. Aniridia thinks of his poetry books and goofy legerdemain, and pulls the velvet apart to step out onto the apron.