our house

By the side of the road, in a neighborhood no one ever looks at, on a street no one ever drives, sits a house. It has things that normal houses do - faucets and ceilings and termites and wood rot. It has peeling wallpaper and tile that gets so uncomfortably cold, squeaky doors, and one step that, on the way down, groans like an old man in pain. It’s a house like the others on its street, with every third house having the same floorplan.

It saves money that way, the house thinks, creaking with a shift of its old bones. It wishes it could move, but it’s kept captive. After all, isn’t every house a little bit trapped under its coats of paint and long-weathered siding?

That doesn’t quite matter, at least not right now. Right now, the thing that matters is that that woman is back. Back, and walking about on the polished floorboards, brand-new to replace the…old ones. She’s leading a couple through each chamber of the house’s heart, pointing out its various organs and commenting on them like they’re just china and chintz when they are so much more than that.

The couple shakes hands with the realtor and signs her papers. It’s just like last time and every time before this one.

Every so often, a company or a person or someone else with the power to obtain deeds and zoning papers will notice that the house has not been occupied for many years. And then they will look at its finery, its imperial ballroom staircase, the Murano glass in the windows - then they wonder why the house isn’t occupied, and dash for the opportunity to sell it. But before long, it always ends up back on the market.

Today, the house rumbles - as the boxes are brought in, the curious couple explores on their own. But it isn't about them. It's about the house.

Trembling under their footsteps, it watches closely as they collapse on the couch, clinking glasses and chasing a bottle of wine to sleep. It’s the only assembled furniture currently sitting on the hardwood floors, the rest all packed away, piecemeal, in boxes. They don’t know what is going to happen - no one ever does. The same could be said for the house, for the realtors, for the neighbors.

The neighbors never know what will draw their new occupants out of the house this time; will they be dragged out in sterile white body bags? Left to rot in some room that wasn’t on the blueprints originally? Or will they walk out themselves, following the moon like a dog on a leash?

Sadly for the neighborhood, the house has different plans this time.

Every house has a memory, stains in the floors and walls and porcelain fixtures. Every house can recall what’s lived in it, and who has lived in it. You can’t make a house forget - much less this one.

Over the years, the house had learned more about the humans who chose to live in its walls. It learned that they could walk, talk, touch. And in the nights, where the wind blew loud enough to disguise the houses’ groaning, it peeled up its floorboards, tore its wallpaper, and crafted a homunculus of a sort.

A two-legged figure, stumbling and careening through the hallways like a drunk, head too small and hands too large, tripping the poor thing up as it tried to parade down the stairs. It wheezed out too much of its exhalations - carbon monoxide - and coughed, hacking up lungfuls of phlegmy, uncured concrete foundation.

Too many of its breaths left the current renters permanently asleep in their beds, and the house withdrew its first child back into its walls, curious. When the people did not rise with the sun, the house felt an unusual sense of…elation? It had gotten rid of - inadvertently - the pests. They were taken out later by other humans, but still, the house remembered them.

Remembered that one was tall, and one was short, wide and wider, respectively.

Remembered that every morning, one would awake and kiss the other, gentle, kind. They’d make food, joined at the hip, and leave together.

The house had an idea, then. Something about the routine was alluring, calling to it, and it put itself to work again. That night, it did not create the child, instead bringing up - out of wood and plaster - the previous couple, the dead couple.

Supplemented with towel fibers and a ticking clock heart, they meandered around the house, piloting themselves, hands reaching for the egg carton and making fire from the stove. There, the flicking of the pilot light and the stove roared to life, catching and licking up the arm of one of the creatures.

It stared dumbly at the flames, orange-gold and white at the center, allowing them to trickle through cloth limbs.

The house - pilot of these simulacrums - had never felt heat. Didn’t know it could bring pain, or hurt. It had previously known about the hot sun, and the feeling of wet humidity on skin, but fire was an enigma. So, it allowed the fire to consume its second-ever guess at humanity, pushing them back into the course of their routine.

Leaving the eggs burning on the stove, the two stumbled their way to the door, footprints like brands being left in the wax-polished floor. At the door, they kissed like they had when they were alive, clunky wooden knobs from drawers serving as mouths. They touched - a quick peck, but it was enough to let a spark jump from one mouth to the other, destruction of both through a poorly puppeteered love. The door swung open, and the couple walked out, collapsing into piles of ash on the lawn.

The house had never experienced death like this before; the death of something it had created. There was no remorse, no sadness, no grief over the loss of its puppets. There was, however, curiosity, and something that stirred up half of a flash of a memory, sitting deeply in the attic, tucked behind feathered insulation and plugging cracks like putty.

Prickled scoliosis fingers of the attic walls burst forward, sifting and sorting in a never-ending wave. They were searching for something old, older than the wooden bones surrounding them. A flashback, between spinal columns lining the walls. The fingers searched, grabbed, tugged and pulled - various fragments fell out of the walls. Soft mink furs from the very first people to occupy the house; back when it was a governor's mansion. Eggshells from the dead couple, photo frames and children's drawings, all things the house had hoarded for its existence, to create with, to draw from.

Finally, the attic finds what it is looking for, tugging out from a mouse nest a small piece of rope. It was much larger, once, now torn and shredded down into its base twine. Holding it between the mockery it calls hands and fingers, the house considers the rope. This was instrumental to its past, and it remembers -

There were five of us, once. There were many more before that. We walked tall in the night, quiet in the day, unseen until we slipped up.

Then we were hunted, prey, fleeing until I was the last. I was the last and they did not want to let me die so easily as they killed my family. I was a specimen; something to investigate, and they wanted to know me. They wanted to destroy me with their knowing.

But what kind of cage could hold something like me? What kind of circus would cater to keeping a freak like me?

So they built the framework of a house; knights and warriors pledged to eradicate what I was - townsfolk and villagers stuck within a tiny area of their wide wild world.

I was forced between the simple columns that held up the rudimentary house, my arms and legs twisted in a spectacularly gruesome display between the skeleton support beams. Chained to the stones that held up the structure around me, they slowly bricked me in.

Every so often - when the house began to break down, when people became suspicious about that "old empty one down on the street," a select few who still knew I was trapped within would come and shore up the walls; rebuild the outside.

I don't know quite how they kept me from public view during their rebuilds, but they did. I grew with the house, learning to wrap my arms around joists, to sit with my legs nestled to my chest. I learned to tolerate the pain of nails and hammers and insults.

Eventually, I came to be like this. No one has visited for many decades now. I think they are all dead. My head occupies the attic; my pelvis, the front door. Kneeling, I support the weight of the building across my lap, my back arched painfully under the staircases. I can feel my body again, for the first time in a very long time.

- and the house is something else now.

It’s been a few months. There are more people now. Drifters, the homeless, the needing. They’ve stayed in the past, and I am not unused to it - in fact, I like it when the squatters come and stay inside me. They are never here for long, and their hands are rough, like mine used to be. They treat my walls like nothing and cover them in sharp-smelling paint, drawings of people loving and hurting - I become a mural, and I love it. No one wants me after that - I am unsellable, unoccupied, for a small time.

I rot a little whenever I am cleaned up from their mess. Whenever gloved hands and rubbery suits enter through the front door, scrub down my exposed brick and scratch away at the mortar of my nerves. It itches, like an insect inside of my skin. They leave soon after, and I no longer smell like human sweat, warmth and bodies and clothing worn for too long without a wash.

I’m bleached clean, purified, ready for the next occupation I have no option for. I am no longer a safe haven, but a model to be shaped and neatly made into a space for people to live within, people that are too clean and too precise.

The next day, I am sold - normally I wouldn’t care, but I am alive again, remembering again, I have a will again. I will not go so easily, not as easily as they trapped me and held me. My only way out is to rot my way out; let the infection of this world overtake me once and for all.

My choice is made.

It’s night when I build them again, night like it always is. An unholy hour for beings that shouldn’t be alive, made out of the house that has become my flesh. I make a woman tonight. Her hair flows with a beaded curtain, clinking in the silent closet that she grows out of, and I let her do as she will.

Her knees creak, made out of the noisiest parts of my staircase, and she follows an invisible line to my new occupants. Standing over their bedside, she stares down, and taps one - the person wakes up, and my creation opens her mouth, water flowing out from the faucets that make up her veins. She used to be the very first occupant, a woman obsessed with collapsing to her knees in the basement, staring up at a shrine with a mirror that reflected her surroundings, haloing her head like she was one of the saints she worshiped. Now she drowns one of the new owners in her love; in her holy water. I listen to the choking sounds die away as her faucet does too.

All used up, she collapses into a shamble of boards and dried-out pipes. The other occupant, sleeping soundly next to the dead one, finally wakes up. I’m not in the room - I am the room - and I see their mouth open in a scream anyway. The noise bounces off of my interior, into my long-skeletonized ears, and I can feel my mouth curl down into something that resembles a grimace. A body is in the closet, another body of my making, and it is the next person that chose to live within me.

An old man; creaky and with stifled bones just like me, papery skin that fell off at the slightest provocation. I killed him with no remorse. Now he wanders from the bedroom closet, balding hair made from strips of his torn shirt, and from my head’s home in the attic, I watch. He stumbles forward, supporting his new body with his old cane, left behind after his death.

The person in bed, fully awake, stares silently now, watching their death walk towards them. The house-made man kneels at the side of the bed, and opens his mouth. It’s made of an old bear trap - rusted teeth spring forward like eager dogs, and split into the living flesh.

It’s a final meal for the final souls that will ever rest here. It’s a sacrifice; to my freedom and to my pain. It’s the end of all things that my captors thought they could do to me. I have been here far too long. I have done far too much.

Blood drips to the brand-new carpet below, and I am formulating the next steps of my plan.

I can’t be here in this anymore. I’ve been trapped like this - a dog in a cage, a wild animal caught to be studied that lived so long it was left to be wild again.

I don’t think I should’ve remembered who I was. I don’t think it was a good thing that I am now able to recall my past - call to mind the nights of walking over plains, taller than anything that existed. My birth was my curse, and I’m here to call an end to it.

I was too much of a coward to do this years ago, when I still had myself - too much fear lived in me then, fear and hope that I might one day make it out of this twisted iron maiden, but I can no longer see the point.

Some of the wandering hands of the attic are allowed to detach from the insulated walls. They scurry around the masonry that encircles the chimney flue where my head is, skittering across the rotten ceiling and into the house proper. Down to the oven, the stove.

I remember how to make fire from the couple who died from their kiss. Twisting knobs and clicking the lighting mechanism, there is a lit flame on the stove, and one of the hands steps inside of it.

Now alight, it bears its scalding burden to the attic. Back to its brethren. Back to me. Me, the unsound old corpse that holds up this place. My body may be mostly dead, but my mind is unfortunately alive. I wait for the hand. As it walks, it spreads its fire through the house, catching it on every silk drapery, the coffee table books, the wooden balustrades of the stairs it marches up.

This is not where I’m meant to be.

I wait for death.

This is not what I’m meant to be.

Death approaches.

This is the only way out.

I succumb.

The next morning, neighbors gather around the burned out shell, mumbling, pulling robes tighter against their frames. “I’m glad it’s finally gone,” a man mutters. His wife elbows him in the ribs. “No one survives that house,” he hisses in return. “They should’ve known better…”

Emergency services work quickly, digging through the rubble of the body they don’t know existed. Finding shattered bones, patterned lining of intestines. They assume it’s porcelain and leather. No one comes to claim a body at the morgue, though there are many. Strange experiments have been done to them.

Many have teacup handles for noses, clocks for hearts, fingers that seem to have been replaced with candlesticks. The city cleans up and forgets about the house, about the people within it.

Life goes back to normal.

The lot where the house was grows over with weeds and blossoms.

No one dares to touch it, to groom it, to make it precise.

The house is dead, and it is happy.