The carpet is thick and greasy and your toes will sluice through it with sickening ease. The mortar has kept tabs on things around here, coding the vibrations of the house into its porous medium as the years swell around you. Human voices linger between the bound sand-and-water and there are more animal sounds in there then we would care to admit; the soft sob of a lonely kitchen, the suffocated grunt of a rutting bedroom. The air whistles between cracks in the glass and for a long time there has been no one with the skill or means or will to repair them. Set deep into their cheap frames, the panes know in their shuddering forms that no one will be coming about anytime soon. The sand, frozen by heat, will continue to be erased from the edges as the web of fissures eke out across their faces. They have allowed the cold and the damp to pass through this brick enclosure. They have failed in their duty as guardians. Let the light in. Let us see out, but permit no force beyond what is comfortable. Thus the mortar and its memory have rotted from the exposure. The bricks jiggle like loose teeth in the harshest of storms. There is no obvious, major damage. But the house has begun to confuse itself. It is shutting down between each zenith of the sun and blink of the moon.
The bedframe lies empty. A skeleton without a womb, shuddering with self-loathing. The bookshelf smiles with soft, rotten teeth, thinking it is the most handsome thing in the house. Below its feet, the carpet is pressed into submission by its mass, while all around it, the grasping fibres creep upwards.
Where the damp cannot yet reach, dust is king. In the dark recesses between forgotten wood and down the little crypt alcoves of mice and spiders, tiny rivulets of unseen worlds are choked by the grey detritus swept in through the failing windows. For many undusted years, the denizens of these silent but busy places have grown used to so much clogging. But now it is too much. Nothing moves, which is not to say it is all dead. Simply, there is an unwillingness to be the first to break the blanket of still. The titans above have no such qualms.
Once, a bathroom pipe burst and put the whole house into shock. The explosion ripped through the plaster in the ceiling and sent a black backlog of arterial water gushing down into the kitchen. The house and its creatures will tell you that this came as an awful surprise. But if you were to interrogate the kitchen table, the primary victim in all of this, for long enough, it would say they were all watching the ceiling bulge for many years prior. But there was no one there to do anything for it. So the water dribbles there still, tickling the mould at the base of its cascade, set deep into the linoleum.
Sometimes, when the house is lucky, there is a fire outside. Hushed human voices cluster around it. The snap and crackle of charring skin and bubbling fat comes wafting up through the cracked windows, and the house leans in, hungry. It is not the churning aroma of the hunted animals that the house so craves, but the saccharine allure of conversation and the warm bodies of those who exchange it.
But, to the house’s deepest frustration, the humans never enter its perimeter. Always, they are on the periphery, leaving the abode empty. They never come near it. Perhaps it is because of something the house did long ago, but cannot remember. Something all the houses did. Because the humans would rather sit out in the blistering rain, than enter any of those unsated places.
Paddy Dobson
17th July 2020