each day the house grows larger.
she knows this.
she knows many things she shouldn’t.
iii.
this was the house’s warning. if i told you, you’d go mad. augury baked into the sugar atop pear and ginger muffins, torn into wood as claw marks, howled by foxes with more than one body. still she asked, pleaded, insatiable: tell me. but, first she was new here, once, and did not speak the language of ghosts and sandwich crumbs and dying fires or the crash of a sea never reached. the first days or songs or nights she spread out her limbs on beds of too-thin pillows and blankets that smelled of her grandfather’s house and felt remembering twist its spindly fingers into her milk-blonde hair. she didn’t remember. or she did. but she couldn’t, not possibly. as she slept, it came only in snatches, quicksilver glimpses of verdant skies and graves aching for their headstones and music that moved like waves upon her soul. she begged the house for knowledge, or a net woven from synapses and dreams so that she might catch it. comprehension.
she was/is a hungry thing, and does not know why she found herself here, in this haunted house. the unknowing is an itch, a gnawing, a needling. when she wakes each morning, it is the dust in her eye that makes it water.
torn between its worry and its desire to oblige her, the house began, slowly, to reveal itself. a floorboard lifted showed a square of spanish sea, a painting knocked aside made a sound like guitar strings ever-so-slightly out of tune. once, she ate a florentine and felt the enormity of her grandmother’s laugh. piece by piece, she came to know the house of memory. one morning on the paint-spattered bathroom mirror, in the steam, the word yours could not be wiped away. this can’t all be mine,
