In the house with the Narnia walls we knelt.  Not like the Winnie-the-Pooh house or the Earthsea cottage.  All primary colors, bright hardwood floors.  The murals on the walls whispered.  We could hear them at night.  We could hear them when we were kneeling.  In the house with the Narnia walls we knelt while outside the furniture repairmen went on strike again.  They chanted and they marched.  We could hear them when we were eating.  We could hear them when we stood in front of the walls and considered the murals.  The figures in the murals were familiar, that is, inhuman.  Presumably they had been painted.  In daylight they stood motionless.  At night they moved.  When storms flashed through the town they clustered in the basement, where we peeled their skins from the slick stone walls in long strips.  We grew thin on those skins.  We grew thin on the surface of that listening.