Page 2 of The House of Quiet

Chapter One

A House Is Not a Home

The House of Quiet sits waiting, the only firm, immovable point in a landscape of rot and treachery.

Deep within it, a heart beats. The heart of the house feels everyone scurrying around above it, all those little points of heat and life and noise .

The heart hates the noise, and it needs it, all at the same time.

Inside the house, tucked not where they belong but instead in the bedrooms downstairs, young people sleep. They’re so loud . The people who used to lie in those beds were old. They took the noise away; they didn’t bring it with them.

But now the young things are there and the house can never rest. Its heart beats too hard, agitated and twitching, and the House Wife feels it and knows that agony but cannot help it.

Yet.

The House Wife, eyes and hands of the house, drifts down the hallway. The heart squirms and thrashes somewhere beneath them all. She wants to soothe it, to promise that soon, soon, things will go back to how they were. Soon, they’ll always have enough.

They just have to deal with all the bodies sleeping fitfully around them first.

She stands over them, staring, hating them. Knowing they must hate themselves, too. She presses a hand to a fevered brow and shushes, but it does no good. She’s not the one who can take this burden from them. She glances upward in longing toward the second floor.

That used to be the noisiest place in the house. There was an order to things then. An even, predictable ebb and flow. Nothing like the strain of how things are now.

They explained the change to her so many times, but words are hard to hold on to. All she knows is now she must be careful. But the house isn’t built to care, and neither is she. She thinks she might have been once, but it’s too hard to think of anything before the house.

She’s always been in the house, and the house has always been in her.

The House Wife returns to where she belongs, standing in front of the red circle. She stares into that scarlet abyss and waits, listening to the cries coming from somewhere far beneath.

“ Shh, shh, shh ,” she whispers, like the whoosh of blood pumping through a heart. “Soon.”