Dwelling

Her house had burned many times, though one couldn’t tell just from the look of it. Cut down to the pale concrete of its foundations, it always sprang back, growing up from its roots and folding itself into that familiar shape: roof like a carapace and shingles like washed-out scales and windows like closed eyelids. Come wildfires or arsonists, her house remained.

There was no mailbox. Upon searching for one, I began to feel a bit foolish for presuming she’d received my letters. But there were stairs, and there was a door, and that was more than I had anticipated, so I picked up my skirts and ascended.

(No one lives up there, the neighbors had said as I passed. You’re wasting your time.)

The door was dust-brown and plain. I considered knocking, before remembering that my footsteps would act as announcement enough.

She was waiting for me, of course. She had seen me through the closed pastel curtains and felt the thunder of my boots on her porch and heard the air displace around the shape of my body. And when I stepped inside I felt her eyes on me, and I felt the lack of a draft as the door swung shut.

It was a house. It was made to be a house and that is what it was. A front room flowed into a living room and then into a kitchen, and the stairs sat comfortably between all three. The walls were barley white. Light refracted off the crystals of the chandelier, trickling into every corner of the architecture.

“My friend,” she said. “I am glad to meet you.”

It was warm inside, like a breath on a day in winter. I stood a little straighter, tucking my hands together so as not to worry the hem of my shirt.

“And I you,” I said. My voice did not carry like hers. The walls were not built for the purposes of letting me speak.

The kitchen was wide, stocked with cupboards and shelves with rounded edges. Artificial fruit clustered in a bowl on the table: lime-green apples, pears the color of lips, pomegranates with jewels for seeds. Against all odds, five crisp envelopes lay next to them. They had the name of a girl as the sender, and the name of something else as the recipient. Warmth rushed to my face as I noticed the first of them, peeking out from under the stack. It was adorned with tiny hearts carved in pen.

She laughed. The sink turned on, erupting with tiny bubbles. “Are you embarrassed? Don’t be. They were so evocative. And you have such a steady hand.”

“Thank you,” I murmured.

We were silent for a moment. I listened to her heartbeat echoing through the woodwork, and wished that my tongue were as sharp as my pen, that I could conjure poetry from the wonder of my arrival.

“Why don’t you sit down,” she said.

I pulled back one of the chairs—cushioned with stale blue satin—and lowered myself into it. I could feel her touching me now: a quiet, deliberate caress. It sunk into my skin and sat there, too-cold but nonetheless intoxicating. I wanted to press up against her fully and feel the creaking of her breaths in my ribcage.

“Where did you live?” she asked. Past tense.

I found myself unable to reply. Images licked at my brain, cold and unfamiliar. Rooms without a beating heart. Caught too much in shadow. “I’m not sure.”

“Hmm. That’s a pity.”

Her breath tickled my face, and I just barely stopped myself from gasping. All of a sudden she felt hyper-present, claustrophobic in the way that she surrounded me. The air thickened and thickened and the light pierced my skull and I realized why she kept all the windows closed.

I had called it a challenge, at first, when I’d spent my days running around with old maps, mind racing with old tales and whispers of a house that breathed. I measured each wall with my gaze, but my fingernails scraped only against dead stone. It became an obsession when I started one day from a nightmare about death by suffocation inside of a giant, hollow exoskeleton. I dreamt of the way that fabric snags on the loose nail of a floorboard like a desperate clutch. I wandered the streets, then, afterward, only half knowing where I was going, waiting for the light from some distant window to feel like a touch to my face.

I had never felt that touch. So I resorted to letters to an address I couldn’t find on any map.

But here, as the light poured over me—I felt something now.

“You’ve been traveling for so long,” she whispered into my ear. Into my mouth. Everywhere. “Why don’t you rest awhile?”

“How long?”

“As long as you like.”