How does a house know it once was a person, rattling keys, feet ranging between hallways? Where does it hold its memories? I don’t know, in fact, until the relief of a doorknob rattling, and footsteps enter my front door.
“You need to stop doing this,” Shuu says. “I’m fine, I just need to be alone for a while.”
I hear our friend Rhee. “I’m happy to stay. I’ll keep to myself if you need that. You have to eat, and you’re forgetting.”
Where does a house experience jealousy? I only know suddenly my timbers felt like they creak tighter in on themselves.
I wish there was a way to speak—I am here. I have no mouth to speak, but maybe I could communicate in another way. Coffee scents trapped in the walls stir. I was always the caffeine addict. The water in my pipes stirs around, dripping into the sink and flushing the junky toilet we always have to rattle the handle to refill.
At the way Shuu startles, though, I am ashamed.
Instead of staying, Rhee comes with food after work, every couple of days. Tries to find things to talk about.
It is too still when Rhee isn’t here.
I ponder my bounds. Cold solid corners, edging into soil. Sides brushed by leaves in the wind. A memory of coolness falling over time, followed by a reversing warmth. It was several days, I think, before Shuu came home.
One day, as white-wine and garlic waft from another pan brought out from another tote, they both seem too sad and tired to force conversation—there’s a clink of dishes being washed, no speech.
Shuu breaks the stillness himself.
“It could be my fault Ash died,” he confesses. “Something went wrong, and I don’t know what it was.”
“Will it help, to face up to that? Maybe you need to figure out what it was, how you miscalculated. I’ve noticed you haven’t been working.”
“Magic doesn’t forgive. We buried Ash, and knowing why we had to do that isn’t going to change it.”
Where does a house feel sorrow? I know I am a house, but hadn’t thought of my once-body as dead. The space between roof and rooms chills.
“No. But maybe you can move on once you figure out the extent of your guilt.”
Once Rhee is gone, there’s no banging of pans, or radio pumped up loud, to announce the change. But there is a generator hum, a clink of glass on glass. Sometimes a gentle change to the air tells what the chemicals and tinctures do. Sometimes a hiss of angry meetings, too.
Late into the night, the singing begins—not Shuu but magic coming alive. As a house I hear it loudly, though Shuu probably only feels it like a prickling on the skin. He is waiting, rings a tuning fork at times, trying to match vibrations.
There’s a greater clattering of glass as he cleans up, in deepest night yet. Then, in the stillness, I hear it—weeping. What can a house do, but listen?
The next morning when he rises there is a different charge to the air—not just whatever he carries from the fridge back out to the lab.
He doesn’t eat breakfast, something he confesses to his mother when she calls, but he promises to eat. I know he means: once he’s finished this last step of his project. This takes him until well past the glowing waves of midday sun.
There is a sung note, as he sets everything in place—clear, on-true. It rings up into my attic, down into the corners of my foundation.
“Ash?” he whispers.
I am still just the house, but now I can see my rooms, see my grounds. And I can see Shuu. I cannot speak, still, which is maybe what he was attempting—he asks aloud, “Ash, what happened?”
I don’t know, either. Our experiments had always been risky, but his careful calculations had kept us from going too far into territory that would endanger us. How had it happened that I had become infused with the house?