When
does a house die?
When the humans abandon its use, and
the forest creeps into the doorways and the windows break.
Well off the traveled highways,
along a trail that gets hot sunlight during the day which turns it to dust,
until evening draws on and shadows of oaks and willows and maples cut it up
like dark claws, along this trail the house I inhabit slowly died.
Houses don’t bloat like other
corpses. They shrink and dry and sag, until it rains. Then they rot for a
season until the heat parches them again. I came during a wet season and now it
is the middle of summer. Even in the evenings it bakes.
The house does. I do, too.
There have been no visitors—no boys
with sticks and projectiles,
no
adventurous souls, no young lovers seeking a place to lie naked, no lost
children at all. And so I’ve gone hungry.
I sleep in a hole that goes deep
into the earth of the basement floor. Until the shadows come back into the
forest, and the sunlight grows dimmer. Then I stir, and leave behind me the thin tendrils
of root, and the fat, hairy spiders that roost among my limbs. They ride with me as
I make my way up the staircase in the cloying humidity.
I move very quietly, listening for
visitors in my dead house.
Do you want to know what I look
like?
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