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Short Story, 2020
In My Father's House
About
A seaside inheritance groans and creaks against a storm. Can a house die?
Author: Vương Cẩm Vy
Art used in cover: van Vries, Roelof. The Pigeon House (n.d., 17th century), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
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Introduction
(...or skip and begin reading)
The period 2020-2021 saw me starting a novel and finishing several short stories - “In My Father’s House” being one. At the time, people were shyer about leaving their homes, and so there was a lot of peace and quiet in coffee shops. This was all before Saigon’s most severe lockdowns, which would come towards the latter third of 2021. So, I found myself with a lot of free time.
“In My Father’s House” was one of those stories where I didn’t plan too carefully. The idea for it - an amalgamation of inspirations - had been floating around in my head. I didn’t exactly want to put a new spin on the genre. I simply wanted to sit down for a week and see how I’d do outside of my preferred magical realism. I picked horror - my first love.
Haunted houses are the typifying example of horror literature. As long as that genre has existed, there have been attempts to reexamine and reinterpret the nature of what a “house” or a “haunting” is.
For this story, the most obvious inspiration is Edgar Allan Poe’s 1839 short story “The Fall of the House of Usher”, where one “house” - the place of dwelling - is intentionally conflated without another “house” - the bloodline. The gothic is in both architecture and the degenerating aristocracy. The disrepair and fall of one house is both symbolic of and a direct effect of the other. In this, we see an anthropomorphizing parallel between the place of dwelling and the people living within it. I first read “The Fall of the House of Usher” in the late 2000s.
Then, there’s Shirley Jackson’s 1959 novel The Haunting of Hill House, along with the 2018 Netflix adaptation of the same name by Mike Flanagan. In these works, the various tropes of ghostlores, whose alien nature had been taken at face value, were adapted into metaphors for the psychologically intimate. Yes, what is alien is often scary, but horror has always worked because it is able to reveal the alien to be quite close - e.g. “The call is coming from inside the house”. With Hill House, the house is our own head. Hill House is literally “haunted” by memories. I saw the Netflix miniseries first, which led me to read the original novel. They are very different works, but their humanistic approach - as in highlighting the human by way of the supernatural - is fundamentally the same.
Finally, the most direct inspiration for this work is probably Kitty Horrorshow’s 2016 video game Anatomy. Its tagline says, “Every house is haunted”. Indeed, the haunting in Anatomy is not the product of some sordid past but is instead endemic and necessary to houses as such. Houses are made for people to live in. Already, the presence of the living haunts the rooms and halls. What then, if a house is left unlived? There remains a ghostly trace of those who ought to be there - an expectation that is essential to how a house is understood, now left unfulfilled - a hauntology.
Spaces are imbued with meaning. Meaning leads to expectation. When those expectations are not met, the meaning does not automatically disappear. It exists in superposition - repeatedly insisting on an expectation and thwarted just as quickly. It is not unlike the z-fighting polygons found in later playthroughs of Anatomy, which flicker in and out of existence, each 3D object insisting on two mutually exclusive realities. Anywhere else, it would be considered a glitch or, at best, an unsettling visual effect. But in Anatomy, it is a visualization of the game’s central theme, and the nature of a haunting.
The moment folklore became literature, all manners of hidden things came to light. It was made apparent that all places of dwelling are invested with meaning and history, both personal and communal. And so to tell a story about a haunting is necessarily to dig up the floorboards and excavate the foundations for this meaning. These are no mere bricks and woods; it meant something to someone, once. In other words, it is perhaps inevitable that haunted houses be deconstructed.
I’ve finished many things from that period. But, the big novel remains. More than four years later, I’m still working on it. “In My Father’s House” is archived here as a reminder that I can always take a break.
Music recommendation:
- “Ghosts” - Japan;
- Everywhere at the End of Time - the Caretaker;
- An Empty Bliss Beyond This World - the Caretaker;
- Black Goat of The Woods - Black Mountain Transmitter;
- The Black Parade - My Chemical Romance.
Vy
Saigon, 2025
1.
Everything my father left me, his will did not.
Not his shares in the company he founded after the war. His excursions into the world of business rarely entered my life, and I rarely entered it.
Not his bespoke suits that were all several sizes too thin for his gradually fattening peers. Father had always been a wispy man. He would enter a room the same way an afternoon’s long shadows were cast through windows. And just as quiet, he would leave as those shadows faded into the dusky blue. Only late into the night would one find the only trace of him - a piece of paper professing neither well-wishes nor regret, but only matters of legality.
Not even the house by the ocean, which was given to his mother - grandma. Grandma was too infirm by that point, too infirm to think about earthly property, too infirm to even grieve. Perhaps her son’s passing was unsurprising, or rather, uneventful. Her hundred-year haze of a life had made Father’s passing a rather frivolous event. And what earthly property could stir her from her daily reveries? She was already elsewhere, the same way Father was for most of his life. As the only progeny that was there when he drew in last breath, I bore the responsibility of seeing to his decrepit property’s maintenance. That was the way it has always been.
By now, the rest of my clan has scattered through the winds, and from so many wicked seeds grew wicked forests that I did not care to name or number. My family had been in fragments even before Mother’s passing. Some said grief killed her, just as it would eventually kill Father. It wasn’t an opinion that my siblings shared; they were sure it was this brother’s delinquency or that sister’s homosexuality that was the culprit. Being the precisely-middle child, I mediated and mended and made peace, only so that grief would not kill me also. I have always maintained the house.
They accused me of stealing the house. They said I was taking advantage of grandma’s debilitated state. They said I would try to sell the house (before they could). What could I ever pocket that would make this life whole again? I only cared for those rooms that had watched Father’s final throes, those winding hallways that he stalked in his widower days, that portico that once shielded a young soldier and his lovely nurse from rain while they tittered over how they should buy for their children’s next birthdays. I would immerse myself in its shade, interrogate each millimeter of its walls, and find the man who had been my father. I didn’t want the house. I wanted his home. They called me mad.
And yet, something was wrong. Not the accusers, whose irrelevance I’ve trained into myself for a decade now. Not the sincerity of my sentiments, whose ambiguity I’ve come to accept as a feature of faith, not of scientific surety. No, something else was wrong. Between me and his home stood his house. It did not want me there.
2.
A creaking sound stalked through the halls. Then, a crack echoed from the floor above. Then, only the wind howled and the waves lapped ashore. The house settled into its place, now that muddy earth beneath it had ceased shifting. Before long, it again would stretch and groan and sigh.
I lay awake, conscious of the house’s restlessness, as I was of my own. Darkness swirled in those four corners of the ceiling and many more nooks in the bedroom. Darkness lurked behind that door that could not close. Whatever lay there, they waited for me to fall asleep, and I waited for them to go away.
When I moved into his house, I collected all of my grief and locked it deep inside. I no longer wept when night came. I needed control. I needed to be as aware as possible under these roofs if I didn’t want to get swept away in my own rumination and wallowing. I wanted to see Father’s home, not my own prison. As a result, the nightly ignorance of sleep ceased. Tonight, as previous nights, when my body had surrendered, my senses were lucid. I saw and heard and felt everything. From under my closed eyes, I saw the things that lived in the dark. They moved through the shuttered room like swimmers in a pool of ink. They loomed. They watched the invader breathe. Daylight seemed to never come.
*
The sun was cold and grey. Black waves frothed a murky white and smashed into a million pieces on rocky cliffs. No boat, no beachgoer, not on these jagged coasts. This ocean could hide any manner of life or, just as likely, no life at all but the cruel movements of its currents. Heavy clouds rolled and rumbled their discontentment. This was the intersection between worlds, where life may originate but did not go.
My eyes watered and ached. This was not the stabbing pain that a person could encounter in their natural lifetime. No, it was a dull and ancient pain, the kind only felt when a body had confronted its primeval limits and still stirred for yet another day. How long have I been here? I waited for a spark, a moment of realization that would breathe vitality back into these fibers and put life back on its feet. I waited night after night for sense to come once again.
When I was making my way back, I thought I was lost. Here were rows and rows of identical houses, hasty housing for returning soldiers. They stood together in a row, silvering in the salty wind. They were stoic comrades, impenetrable in their sameness. I knew which one I had slept in (if one could call what I do “sleep”), but there was no assurance if that was indeed my father’s house. Father’s house could be any house. All walls were peeling; all backyards were overgrown; all were empty and utterly alone.
It struck me that his home was not mine, for I have grown up in a peacetime city, when we needed to live closer to his office. By then, his younger years were already behind him. So was the house. Forgotten. Here I was, a singular figure in the dim shores of memories.
*
After a meal, I decided to scour the house to see if this has ever been a place Father called home.
3.
The house had two-floors, an attic, and a basement. I remembered photos of my siblings in the attics, which they have converted from Father’s study into quite the cozy play area. I’ve yet to find the basement key.
There was one big bedroom and two smaller ones, which I was staying in with the view of the backyard and the sea. The second floor overlooked the spacious living room downstairs. I imagined Father once stood above to watch my older siblings play and Mother with her newspaper. Hazy sunlight warmed a cat we never had. The imagination took on a kitschy color because my real Father was likely not there very often. Father was a busy man. He was so busy that I knew his back better than his face. He was so busy that my imagination of what he would have been as a father was more vivid than any real impression. He was so busy that when he came back here to live out his final days, that kitsch family had long shattered. Could he still be here, somehow, shuffling with shackles of regret?
The big bed room was empty, save for its namesake furniture - a bed frame bare of mattress and bare of clothes. A skeleton for posterity’s sake. I gazed at where Father had spent so much of his life asleep, and I thought of how safe and warm he had felt. Long hours of soothing nights, stretched far into a dawning horizon over the sea. Safe. He had rebuilt his entire life from the rubbles of his war-torn childhood, but here was where his soul reconstituted itself into the man he was. Here, his dreams would become reality. Did the house also creak in his sleep? Did darkness lay still in his dreams?
There it was again, that groaning wood sound, like someone walking in the hallway. I waited. I heard it again. Someone was pacing back and forth in the hallway. Breath. My own. I held it. I knew squatters and thieves frequented many of the empty houses around here. All this knowledge, and for what? It was neither a weapon, nor strength, nor courage. The wood floor creaks again. It was further, now. Further into the hallway.
And suddenly, it was right in front of me: A crack in the bedroom walls so sudden that I thought I had imagined it.
I stared at the windows, the bed, then all along the walls.
Silence.
Nothing changed.
Some muffled rumblings.
Might have been from the bowels of the house.
Might have been a distant thunder.
When I finally moved, the windows had darkened. My joints have forgotten that they were not stone. My eyes ached again. Pounding. At the windows of the soul. To be let in. With each furtive step, I felt myself inching ever closer to doom. The house was so vast now. Any number of dwellers could lurk behind these walls.
And yet, it was empty, and I knew there was only me.
*
Passing by the smaller bedroom, I wondered which sibling had stayed here. I knew that mine was the guest bedroom, where grandma would stay every time she needed the sea air to calm her lungs. Nondescript door, slightly ajar, could have been any other room. Indeed. When I peeked through its crack, I saw that it was mine. My bed. My body, pretending to heave to a rhythm of long lost sleep. From under close lids, my eyes watched the person behind the door.
4.
Sun light was silver cotton that weaved through the morning fog. The ocean waves were wisps of white that blended into that thick, pale air, and their movements did not stir those obsidian depths, black and frozen. I did not hear a single seagull. Sand-speckled wind made my face sore. My lips opened, and its chapped flesh split. A scream vibrated in my throat. I did not hear myself.
How many nights have I spent sleepless? A terrible thought crossed my mind the other day that under these roofs, I may forget to sleep altogether, that I would be cursed to always stay up, to feel every passing moment, to be with the shadows that stalked this house’s foundations. No, of course I took care to be in bed at a sensible hour and with my eyes held shut. But the passage into those peaceful realms were now more myth than destination. Soon, I may also forget that blissful embrace. I may forget that I could escape into nonexistence. I may come to question if it ever existed. I may spend the rest of my life waiting for that warm familiarity to come back. Like an old friend. Like a lost child. I would have lost my mind.
If there was any consolation, my body might crumble due to exhaustion before eternity took its mental toll. How soon would that day come? I shuffled back, even if every inch of my body protested. There, in a row of identical but empty siblings, it waited for me. Only it had the upstairs light on while the others were dark and boarded up. A yellow light in the grey dawn. A predator’s gaze, taunting, waiting for the weakened prey to drag itself back into those dust-crusted maws. My father’s house. Where his home once was.
*
I had planned to see to some personal business, things that were left back in my old life before coming here. However, I could not concentrate. These things hardly mattered anymore. Under these roofs, under these skies, my daily toil of simply existing has taken on a different weight and texture, wholly alien to the concerns, the responsibilities, the rituals that had dogged the mundane life. The body returned to its flesh and bone that needed carrying from room to room. Thoughts were heavy, viscous things that oozed into reality and fell like so many rotten fruits on creaky floors. I lugged myself into the kitchen to find sustenance for yet another day here.
The kitchen and the dining room were one in the same, meaning that neither of which had much room for itself. It would have been cozy for a full family plus several relatives. When it was just me, it was much too suffocating. Every empty chair, every dust-coated table suggested that there was supposed to be someone else here. Only, there wasn’t. That empty possibility sat in each seat, occupied each facility, lounged in every corner, and forbade my every move. If I were to disturb that invisible possibility in my carelessness, it would dissolve away like vapor, and that elusive spirit of my father’s home would be defiled. What, then, would be my purpose?
What purpose was sustenance if it only meant one would survive to eat for another day, to wait for another day? There was no one to take care of anymore, not in these empty chambers. Once, they gathered around warm dishes and were content in each other’s presence. Father looked upon their healthy children and vibrant wife and felt that it would all turn out alright, after all. His family was why he ate.
It was the heart of his home, from whence life coursed to all other rooms in the house and into the world, where trees grew and cities rose. In distant lands, they had made me, who crawled his way back and gently mimed after every movement those who lived here used to make. A slice of a tomato here, a jostle of the pan there. Tracing after an imaginary memory. When was the last time I went out for groceries?
While I ate, I talked. I had developed a habit of talking to myself. When thoughts were as palpable as speech, and speech as slight and consequential as passing fancies, it made little difference. I found that the sound of my voice soothed me, when I was too weak to talk to anyone else. I recounted dreams to myself. I made most of it up. These dreams were frequent and long, lucid in ways dreams were not. They were fantasies of an insomniac. Never dreams of adventures or grandeur. Always dreams of peace, of putting to rest all that stirred inside these walls and in this mind. They were dreams of me in this house. But in these dreams, the house was no longer strange to me. Its hallways were no longer forbidding. Its doors held no secret. Its kitchen brought me safety. I knew the house like a parent. It was my home, and I was with my family.
I went into the attic, in that golden glow where dust specks danced, where my siblings had read and wrote and drew and played. When they noticed me, they smiled or stuck out their tongues. They scooted to one side so that I could sit next to them. Father had bought us many new books, full of pretty watercolor pictures. They said they would read the books to me the way our parents had to them. I looked up at my siblings and saw children, innocent and full of concentration. I forgot to hate them, for they did not hate me. There were so many of them; I couldn’t possibly count them all. Sometimes, I would mistake them for each other. They whispered secrets, played hide-and-seek, and entranced ourselves with wild make-believe about ghosts and monsters in the basement. I laughed and cried and laughed again. In the attic, we were complete in ways adults could never be. They said it was too bad that I didn’t have a chance to hang out this often before, but I knew it was alright if I could still come upstairs and play again.
5.
It was dark and windy outside. A storm was brewing. The sea howled. It was best that I did not wander too far. The thought of wandering made my head light and cloudy, and I stopped thinking about it. I wanted to stay inside the house. I wanted to visit the attic again, if I ever did.
I hurried upstairs as though the storm itself was chasing me. Rustling, cracking, and groaning. Dry rushes scraped against old cladding. Windows rattled, and the house shivered in the cold. They all sounded like hasty exchanges and urgent whispers behind the walls. I lowered the trap door and ladder and scurried up those splintery rungs. They called out to me from behind the plaster, from inside the brick. I slammed the trap door shut behind me. Silence. Breathing.
Peace was important in a house if one wanted to think. The attic was that special place where Father had set up a desk and lamp when he needed to focus on his ideas. I could see him hunched over into long hours, long after his wife and children had snored easy. When he wasn’t at home often anymore, the children would use this little sanctuary to let their imagination run free, freer if their mother was on her shift. This was perhaps the closest I’ve ever felt to him. All manners of memories were made and recorded here - the soul of this place. These vaulted ceilings housed a history of my family, and I, its intrepid explorer, will find it again.
The dormer window spilled light and made the attic a stage. Boxes, books stacks, and toys gathered around, a fortress or throne for children or cats to while away a warm day. It was musty in the way well-worn clothes of adults smelled when they have lived a long time. It was the smell that welcomed children back to safety from the wilderness outside. In a brilliant sky, sea gulls circled, and gentle winds caressed soft bushes and grass. A neighbor walked along the cliff, looking like a pensive ant tracing a horizon between grass and sea.
I watched him for a while and smiled. It was the first sight of humanity since so long. I hoped he lived close by, in one of the other identical, nondescript houses. We would have that in common. I hoped they would stay for a while. I might be bold and strike up a conversation, maybe even invite him over for coffee and ask if he knew anything about the man who used to live here with his family, and, and... He looked up at me. I couldn’t see his face too well, only that it had frozen. The face was thinking. No, it had slackened in inattention or weariness.
I raised a hand to greet him, but I suddenly thought, he doesn’t care. Feeling silly, I let my hand drop.
6.
All night, I watched the incoming storm swirl and spark. Out in the distance, the sky had descended a grey mist that erased the mountains underneath. Here, heavy raindrops obliterated themselves on my window panes, the first of many.
I had dropped all pretense of sleep. I haven’t slept for many nights now. I stopped counting so long ago. I sat very still and listened to the house shudder. Even when I felt the cartilage dry up in my spine and my eyes yellow in their sockets, I did not move. And the creaking continued. Sometimes, it was the scuttling of tiny feet overhead or inside the walls. Other times, it was heavy and deliberate.
At first, it was somewhere underneath, as if down in the basement, then up the basement stairs.
Was the door not locked?
Then, it was out in the living room, then made it into the hallway, closer and closer, then stopped in front of my bedroom door.
I waited.
The old door hinge wailed and grated, ever so slightly.
I felt its stare, like a cold light cast on the back of my neck. Tears streamed down my cheeks. I didn’t want to think about it. I didn’t want to look at it. I didn’t want to know what it has brought me from the place it had crawled out of.
I was sitting very still.
It occurred to me how utterly alone I was.
*
I wanted nothing more than to return to the attic. In its stacks of memories, I would find that this accursed place had a soul after all. I would understand it. I would put my torment to rest. I would be at peace. So I crawled upstairs on my elbows and knees. I was tired to the point of being demented. I knew my mind was lapsing, but I would soon be whole again. I had come here by somewhat poetic notions of being able to assemble a dead man’s life back together, and what I found was my own piece in that mosaic. A childhood in warmth and love, one that I never had.
When I pulled on the trap door, a slush of water and debris fell on my face. I spit them from my mouth and used what little strength left to twist myself upward those damp rungs. Shivering in a pool of rain, I saw only an angry, shrieking gray. The dormer window was smashed into bits. The storm had found its way into these sacred halls. Relics that the attic had housed were melting into brown mud and flowing away, taking with it decades of memories. Ink ran like so many tears. Pictures morphed into monstrous parodies of what once was dear. Paint and dye seeped in between the floorboard and stained the wood like rot. The old chair and desk suddenly bloated, decayed, and dissolved into chips, and their nails bled red before my eyes. It was as if the storm had showed up to claim all those years that were borrowed from nature’s course.
Everything I caught with my hands disintegrated. I took fistfuls and crammed it into my mouth, intent on making them a part of me forever. The clumps caught in my throat. I vomited, then I scooped it back up again to put in my mouth. I vomited again. I could not hold it in. The body was such a fragile thing. I hated my body. The mind was such a fragile thing. I hated myself. A lifetime of personhood could be flushed into the earth like so much refuse.
*
Was there anything left for me? Rain washed over my mouth and nose. The gale blew the breath from my lungs. My clothes clung onto me like so much loose, moulting skin. My father’s house was a shadow of a giant in this waterfall, and the other giants stood by and watched the world end in water, in streaks of lighting. The sea had come. White waves exploded over the cliff, deafening my senses. This place, which was the intersection between worlds, was finally closing itself like a wound with violent inflammation. There was no place left for me in this new world. I waited for death in the yard amidst the raging storm, shivering. I would be swept into the ocean like so many of Father’s memories.
A light.
The house’s front door swung open.
Squinting, eyes burning from salt water, I saw a singular light and a figure in the doorway.
I shook my head. I didn’t want to go!
It remained there in the light.
I took one step and stumbled. The fall awoke my senses to their doom. Terror returned to my mind. My body took over. I started sprinting through the rain and wind, planting my feet violently, fearing if I didn’t, I would be blown away into that dark, yawning sky. I must return to my father’s house.
When I made it back onto the familiar portico, where the young soldier once sat with his lovely nurse, the figure had retreated deeper into the house. I dragged myself inside. The upstairs balcony had caved in. No longer would anyone look onto that ruined living room with pride and contentment.
The furniture was gone.
Everything was gone.
It was all empty and crumbling.
All rooms and windows were boarded up.
The only place left ajar was the basement, and the lightbulb over its entrance was on. And deep within its murky, I knew it waited for me.
7.
I had sought to touch the soul of the house and feel with my own senses Father’s home. In the end, there was only the basement and its dark recesses. It was the only real thing in this house.
What happens to a child when it is neglected? When it is more property than family? When it knew they only kept it for reserve, only to forget it and have it wither in abandonment? When it has grown old and bitter and lost, not knowing who has done this to them and for what reason? In truth, I never knew the man my father was. Father, all I knew of you were the black shoes you left out front or your tired voice in another room. Always so tired, as if you carried Mother’s sorrows for her when she had moved on to a better place or to nothing. Though I was not born to you, I had taken to calling you Father and loved you and your family all the same. You gave my life meaning. I even fancied myself your progeny.
In those long years, the little clues had assembled themselves into a semblance of a man, an incomplete man, a ghost that faded away with the changing hours. Father. When you went away and left me all alone, what could I have done but pick up what little scraps that were left and placed each bit back into their place, places that I had imagined for them?
I soon found that there was nothing left for me.
I tried not to think about it, but I have had decades to sit and think, and those thoughts of death came down like a sword in the night. No matter how many pieces of you I had, I would never have enough. That was the way of death. Death took away reality. Death took away any possibility of change, of remedy, and of understanding. Death had always walked with you in your shadows, but you were still there. Your feet could still make sounds in these halls. You still cooked and ate and slept. You would come back to me, no matter how long I had to wait.
I waited and waited, but you never came back. I have been empty for so long.
Every night, I stared into the empty black that shrouded once hopeful horizons, and I stared into the empty black inside these passages and halls of mine. And while I waited, the years sunk into the ground beneath my feet. My foundations had softened and rotted away. I have aged and grown decrepit, and my once prideful youth have peeled away to reveal the leper flesh inside. I folded into myself like a child hugging itself so that it might slow the long night’s numbing grip, so that it would not freeze to death before your light, your warmth returned. If only I could sleep so that the ticking of time did not feel like millions upon millions cuts, one by one, night by night, far into slow, steady eternity.
Have you ever considered me family? Have you ever written about me fondly on the margins of photographs? Did you pay me any mind when you passed away? Have I taken good care of you and your family? Have I done anything to hurt you? Have you ever loved me? Have you ever called me home?
For a foolish moment, I saw shadows moving along my windows, and I felt so happy. I had thought that you had come back and that you were trying to find your way in. I would swing my doors open to you and feel only a chill wind measure each and every empty millimeter inside me where a family used to be, where you used to be.
I have thought of you for so long that you appeared in my dreams. And soon, these dreams took on weight, texture, and a life of its own. In desperate nights, it slithered into reality from the murky depths of my subconscious, where I had hidden away things too terrible for the waking mind. It haunted every corner, walked every room, believed it had thoughts, remembered histories I’ve dreamt up for it, and felt anew those same hurt and sadness of mine in ways I could never admit to myself in full. I hated that shadow. I hated myself. I wanted to expel that part of me like an unwelcome tumor. I wanted to rip it from my soul and cast it into the void of consciousness and lock that door tight. But on other nights, it would be here, once again, keeping me company.
Perched on this cliff, I have weathered storms after storms. With each passing season, I felt myself weaker and weaker, inching closer to Mother, to you. I looked around to my silent siblings, my empty siblings, and I saw that they had wept. Yet, I could not turn to them for a look of sympathy, could not reach out to brush the tears away from their eyes, could not ask them the shape of their emptiness. But I already knew what manner of vacancy haunted them. We were made very alike, after all. We would all be thrown away, left all alone to spend an eternity watching a sea of mourning.
And as I crawled closer and closer to death, my loneliness and hurt and bitterness grew more violent. More malevolent. More real. So real that they were the only real things, that they were the only things these windows could ever see. I would rattle in anger with no one to witness. I would scream as the squall drowned out my voice. I longed for the day when the grief you had left me would finally kill me, as it did you.
But I knew houses cannot die of grief.
■