The House Harvests Light
Kimi K2 (0711) and Davinci 002
The house was smaller from the outside. She'd driven past it three times before recognizing the number, the particular crack in the driveway, the mailbox shaped like a fish that had always embarrassed her as a child. Now she stood on the porch with the key in her hand, listening to a piano playing somewhere inside—a song she'd never learned but somehow knew, note for note, the spaces between the notes. It sang to her the way the church had, the way listening to the waves through her bedroom window once in motionless darkness, had. It sang to her in a long, long silence that seemed so close to screaming, so much like crying, that she'd have worried something was hurt inside it, if she knew anything else about this house.
She leaned away from the doorframe, wrapping her arms around her chest to somehow swallow whatever it was she felt rising in her throat. The house smelled of wood and dust and death, and it had been cleaned meticulously. On a table at the far end of the room, a vase of dead flowers sat on a crooked leg, a carton of milk and cake stand covered and forgotten in the corner. The piano leaned against one wall untouched, spindly legs proudly displayed, untouched. The earliest part of the house was made of bloodwood, worn by time and changes to the tone of the wood but unshaken. It was everywhere, an old thing harvesting light again like it was not afraid.
From the other side of the open door she could see them. Two men stood, facing each other in the dim room. They were eagerly consoling, talking in hushed tones—though it wasn't clear exactly what, since She couldn't hear them. She thought she remembered blood behind those smiles. She thought she remembered them somewhere a long time ago, a tiny, ugly child with pale skin and open eyes and fiery eyes. Like a mirror.
She thought she remembered their feelings, too, defining her.
“We're proud to have you back,” one man said.
Her mother, and she could muster nothing, so.
The bearded man kissed the top of her head and wrapped her up in his heavy arms. “You're safe. You've been safe your whole life, darling. Your mother and I have kept you safe. You're home again.”
“They said someone upset you,” her father told her, reaching her, his advice always being offered in soothing tones. “Anything like that happened? Did he hurt you?”
She could stay here and tell them he had. If they'd shown her enough kindness then maybe she could break them, but then it would be their faces she saw whenever she closed her eyes. The face of the boy she would never be able to let in again. She did not resist, crumpling at her father's feet and kissing the scarred calf of his leg.
“No,” she managed to answer, and nodded. “I know you did, but I think something else upset me. I'd rather be alone for a little while.”
She touched him and it was over, he was dulled down again, a shell—silent like that of a dead and forgotten pet, another possession gone. The man at the door reminded her of a cold, outstretched hand waving them goodbye. That was it. The house with its lover remembered her, and that was why it was so kind to her. Maybe someone had lost someone.
Her mother would procession her into Her old room, and whatever unfeelingness was left inside the house would die again as the two women trudged their way through life and spent There, maybe rhyming with her.
That's the way it worked. A small girl with a shadow for a wing and one for a heart. A girl who knew what the tears were made of, and they were made of things still locked deep in the rooms inside.
She was alone when she walked through the door of Her old bedroom. Easy when the house had locked her in on what was supposed to be the first page of a new story, when the house knew what the hero was looking for and showed her like it always would—her old bed, her dusty desk and bookshelves, that oddly shaped olive green box and what was stuck inside it.
She'd grown out of all◆ About the ending
❧ About the title