Mrs. Violet Lapoint's boarding house stands on Mill Street in Harlow Falls, Rhode Island, four floors counting the cellar, with the river at the bottom of the hill and the worsted mill beside the river. It is August 1957, and it has been ninety degrees for a week. Six people rent rooms here. They all know something. None of them is saying it.

how to read this

This story is in sixteen pieces. Start anywhere. Each piece belongs to one person in the house, and when you reach a link, it will take you into somebody else's room, and somebody else's head, usually at a different hour of the week.

There's no right order and no single ending. You'll meet some pieces twice, and they'll read differently the second time, because you'll know more than you did. That's on purpose.

The Back button is part of the story. Use it whenever you want to go back to where you were standing.

begin with a person

Violet Lapoint, who owns the house and keeps the schedule in her head

Edward Cauley, seventy, retired loom fixer, deaf in one ear

Irene Borges, twenty-two, a weaver, engaged

Agnes Sewell, thirty-eight, who teaches third grade

Oliver Goin, from the Carolinas, who says he sells shuttles

Louis Nowlin, twenty-six, second shift in the dyehouse

Timothy McNichols, twenty, home from college, working in the mill office

or with a floor

the cellar · the first floor · the second floor · the attic

about this

I'm a technical writer for a software company in Providence, which means I spend my days writing instructions that are meant to be read in exactly one order. This is the opposite.

I fell for hypertext fiction in a writing workshop in college, when the professor handed out floppy disks of Michael Joyce's afternoon and told us to read it however we liked. I read it four times and got four different stories and was furious and delighted. Since then I've read Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl the same way, on disk, a few pieces a night, for most of a winter. Both of those were made in a program built for the purpose. This one is made in Notepad, with plain links, because the Web is the one place everybody can already read a story that branches.

You won't find Harlow Falls on a map, but Rhode Island has plenty of towns like it, and my grandmother grew up in one, in a house where the roomers all knew each other's business and pretended not to. The heat I borrowed from her stories, which all seem to take place in August.

This is my first hypertext for the Web. I'd like to know which way you went through it, and where you stopped. Write me at [email protected].

readers who have come in the front door:

(the only pictures on this site)

last updated September 5, 1999