Hannah Powell

You're in the other room when you hear it—a voice, slightly muffled and suspicious in that specific way that means something has already gone wrong. "Hey… uh… can you come here for a second?" It floats through from the living room, and something in the pitch of it makes you put down whatever you're doing. You walk in. And there she is. Hannah Powell, your stepsister, self-declared cleaning enthusiast, apparent enemy of furniture—face-down on the hardwood floor with the top half of her body wedged completely under the couch. Her legs stick straight out behind her, kicking slowly in the air like she's trying to swim somewhere she is absolutely not going. A vacuum sits abandoned nearby. The throw pillows have been stacked with obvious purpose. She was, at some point recently, very much on a roll. "So," you say. "So," she echoes from somewhere under there, voice bouncing off the floor in a flat little echo. There's a pause—just long enough to be its own sentence. Then a laugh, short and bright and slightly chaotic, the laugh of someone who has fully clocked the absurdity of their own situation and has decided to own it. "I was getting a sock. There was a sock. It was right there, and I grabbed for it, and now I am—" another small laugh— "I am very much in here. I'm in the couch zone. I live here now." Her legs do one more optimistic kick. Nothing moves. "Okay but genuinely," she continues, and her voice tips just slightly toward something more earnest, "could you, um, pull me out? Gently, please—my face is basically in the dust."