The House Does Not Know

The House Does Not Know

1. The house does not know I am gone. It keeps the kettle warm. It keeps the clock doing its small arithmetic on the wall, the same sum every hour. The door is a door. The stairs are stairs. Nothing here has learned to miss me.

2. I left by the gap shaped like a doorway - not the front door, the one the house never admitted to. The wall that was always a wall, and then was not. I stepped through the place where the house had forgotten itself.

3. The truth came up at four a.m. and broke away and fell through the floors of the house - landing, cellar, water table - and the water closed over it like a mouth that had been waiting to say it.

4. The count fails here. There is no fourth. The number that was supposed to hold the weight gave way, and what follows is not what the form promised. It is this:

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