by Valya Dudycz Lupescu

Houses talk. Well, some of them do. Most of them did. Many don’t anymore.

Like you.

Like any love story, your beginning is every golden shade of honeymoon: years of barefoot dancing and bed bouncing, freshly painted walls that echo happy moans and hungry cries, air filled with rye bread baking and coffee brewing, shiny oak floors for block building and board game playing, a paper chain of daily meals around a long barnwood table—the light in your heart a solstice sun.

Time flows through your halls and scatters sand as the parts that once worked begin to grate against each other, until overwound and mishandled they break down. Your family stops dancing together in the kitchen, no longer wish-watching for stars on the porch. Dust thickens around the crystal vases, and no one replaces the batteries in the wall clocks.

Shared stories sharpen into barbs until everyone feels attacked all the time. They stop taking off their shoes when they come inside. No one wipes the smudges off your mirrors. The television stays on, and everyone answers the phone on the first ring. You get divided into zones and the doors stay closed. You feel yourself breaking up into pieces of a puzzle that no one remembers they started.

Hands that potted plants and caressed fabrics onto your walls stuff scrapbooks and mismatched socks into cardboard containers. Afterthoughts of Halloween costumes and handmade ornaments shoved into black bags destined for a pile … someplace else.

Not here. Not with you.

On the last day of boxes and tearful glaring, no one cares enough to wash your floors.

No one comes back.

At first the quiet is a balm: the squeak and settling of boards, squirrels on the roof, bees buzzing around woodpecker holes. Rains rolling down windowpanes and the howl of a displaced dog distract you from the relics: baggies of baby teeth left on the closet shelf, dusty icons forgotten in the dining room hutch, wedding dress molding in the basement—discarded promises.

Weeds stretch taller through cracked concrete as the mail pile stops growing. Cold, damp air enters with the opossum and rabbits, cats and bats. The wallpaper curls; the wood warps; the paint peels. You feel yourself fade with each missing shingle and cracking crown molding. Winter hurts the most, heart-punch of hollowed-out rooms where holiday nights were once filled with fairy lights and couch cuddling.

You grow weary under the weight of waiting.

Until a steel-toed boot crashes against your front door, and footsteps in your foyer echo down into the basement where you have settled into a dispirited haze. Nervous giggling as they carve cartoons into the banister and write their names in marker on the green deco tile of the kitchen. They hide things in your pantry and sleep on blankets in front of the fireplace they have filled with candles, wax rivers running onto your planks. They paint the walls with rainbows and hang wrinkled bed sheets in front of the windows. They leave garbage in the bathroom and take away your crystal doorknobs and glass sconces. Smoke damages your ceiling and they make a hole in the upstairs floorboards; but every time they touch you, you tell yourself it’s love.

You wait for them, their loud music and cigarette kisses, comic books and combat boots, and for a while it feels like family. Then one-by-one they stop coming, until the last remains alone inside for weeks, the smell of sickness heavy on his breath as he kisses your door knocker on his way out. “Wish I lived here for real,” he says.

You never see him again.

A few times a year, when the leaves have fallen and the night is crisp, gaggles of children come with hushed voices in search of ghosts and goblins. They practice fear, looking in your darkest nooks for secrets but finding only the cold.

You stop holding your breath every time a new hand touches your doorknob. With their rock throwing and pissing contests, you feel something harden. You ache for warmth, and anger creates its own kind of heat.

You dream of burning.

That is when the creatures crawl down your chimney, Old World monsters who value a well-built house without human blight. Mouths wide with pointy teeth grinning, they camouflage onto your walls so their skin matches yours—they reframe the way you see yourself.

They wait for the children, watch from the eaves when clowns and robots, witches and skeletons burst in. Weaving a web of whispers and reflections around them, the creatures feed off the fear you can see like smoke in the air. After the children run away screaming, the creatures swallow the thick, delicious dread with wide-open mouths. They lick fear off the floorboards and catch it dripping raw from the ceiling onto their long, pointy tongues. They dance joyfully through your halls, kiss your corners, and tell you what a wonderful house you are.

You learn to love your cracks, to lean into the cobwebs and jagged, broken bits. You exhale your groans onto the wind, shake your shutters, creak unapologetically into the wide eyes of uninvited guests. You find ways to hide your fearsome family when it’s necessary, holes that appear, walls that vanish, the impossible stretching of shadows.

Yuletide comes, and in the way of old offerings, they bring you gifts: evergreen branches, a glittering bauble, a gingerbread man, a string of garland. They light a fire and gather together in front of the hearth with their treasures, caressing your floors and walls with claws and fur fingers, the sound of their singing and stomping and beating of wings—a carol carried by the wind under the sills and out of your weep holes.

A knock at the door and your family explodes into happy cackles and hungry howls, scattering into shades of midnight as the flames of your hearth grow brighter and more inviting.

You have learned that love always leads to being haunted, so you open.