- Lily: I have heard myself say that a house with a death in it can never again be bought or sold by the living. It can only be borrowed from the ghosts that have stayed behind. To go back and forth, letting out and gathering back in again. Worrying over the floors in confused circles. Tending to their deaths like patchy, withered gardens. They have stayed to look back for a glimpse of the very last moments of their lives. But the memories of their own deaths are faces on the wrong side of wet windows, smeared by rain. Impossible to properly see. There is nothing that chains them to the places where their bodies have fallen. They are free to go, but still they confine themselves, held in place by their looking. For those who have stayed, their prison is their never seeing. And left all alone, this is how they rot.
- Lily: I am very seldom required to wear white by my employers. But, anyway, I always do. It has always been that wearing white reassures the sick that I can never be touched, even as darkness folds in on them from every side, closing like a claw.
- Iris Blum: Where did you go, Polly?
- Lily: I didn't go anywhere, Ms. Blum. I'm here with you, same as I have always been. The same Lily Saylor of 43 Hoover Road, Altoona... Pennsylvania. At your service.
- Iris Blum: You had so much to say in those first years. When you lived here with me. Enough to fill a book. And then... nothing. You turned your back. You turned your back, and you turned your back so many times... that soon your feet were facing the wrong way altogether. And I had to watch you come into a room... back to front. I did nothing but sit and listen. I made no noises. I welcomed no visitors. And here, now, you've come back. But only to hurt me, only to show yourself, but not to let me see. You hardly resemble yourself. You poor, pretty things whose prettiness holds only one guarantee. Learn to see yourself as the rest of the world does, and you'll keep. But left alone, with only your own eyes looking back at you, and even the prettiest things rot. You fall apart like flowers.
- Lily: It can't be too much longer now. Because time spent in a house with a death in it passes more quickly, you know.
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What is the Japanese language plot outline for I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House (2016)?
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