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?
“I think it was my fault,” he says. “I was careless about the notes that night, because we’d fought. About dishes duty. Dishes! But you had left residue on the beakers, that’s why I was upset. Did I miss one? I don’t know.”
His silky-haired head is down, gazing at our cobbled-together trestle tables, littered with his papers, but the colored fluids that composed our spells all neatly grouped along the middle, far from the edge where I could have—must have—knocked them off.
So careful.
My sadness makes the stairs creak, like ribs tightening against a heart.
And where could a house form a voice?
I know I was the one who had pushed—the spell was dangerous, but could be our big money-making patent. It was one of my wild ideas that had made Shuu edgy, though we’d done crazier things.
I hadn’t meant to try it on myself—we did trials first, always.
But I’d left a beaker on a corner of the table, like Shuu always chided me….
I’m sorry, love. I’m sorry.
Rattling pipes and making wraiths of coffee aroma aren’t sufficient. The dappling of afternoon sun on the sides of my house make me wish I had trees, rain, anything more than this inanimate board-and-block to express my words with. I’m no longer jealous; if Rhee can hold this still breaking Shuu in warm arms, I welcome that.
In time, maybe, I can discover a new lexicon even with these limits. But even so I’m not sure I can ever reassure Shuu that it wasn’t his fault that he can move on, that I don’t mind.
Shuu takes a jagged-edged breath, and his head lifts.
“It think you are haunting this house,” he says. “I can sometimes sense it. The blinds haven’t fallen, the way they used to, and the hallway no longer has that little rise to trip me. So if you’re listening, Ash, this is for the best.”
His steady hands take a familiar lemon-yellow concoction, carry it to the far end of the table where sky-blue indicates a reversal preparation. He draws an exact measure of the reversal to add to that fateful embodiment infusion. As he draws near the spot on the floor still bleached sickly yellow from the mishap, I rattle my windows, to tell him not to do it—not to let me go.
Surely he can’t ignore the racket, as if a wind hits the house from every side at once. I keep wafting out the scents of cologne, of laundry soap, speaking with the small noises of a discontent house.
He pauses, kneeling before the floor.
“Now I know you’re here,” he chokes out. “What should I do? Should I just do it to myself, and become your fellow ghost? I swear I’m sorry for what happened! I can’t bear that it happened to you.”
Ah. And maybe a house can’t feel how much it hurts to be haunted.
I once more take stock of what I transmuted to. The gritty edges of my foundation, shelter of small creatures and sleepy seeds in cool soil. The wind-shielding walls with tickling paint and eaves as shoulders. The inner narrow shells of walls, layers of defense. I let go of the last fragrance of brewing coffee, and in an imperceptible bowing open my window-eyes wide to stream in light.
How does a house say, It’s OK, I’ll let go?
With a warm draft pooling around Shuu’s knees and outstretched hands. With a silence that lets his shaking fingers spill the antidote upon the boards where I became the house.
How does a house say, It worked, we were close, just like we knew we were?
Letting the house fall asleep without me, like the sigh of a settling floor.
Crowe Powell has lived in many different houses, sometimes in the same towns but often in different states and even countries. She currently writes from one in Western Massachusetts, where she also sells books, plays hockey, and holds poetry workshops in unlikely places.