The House on the Hill

I am in a house. The house. I know it with a certainty that sits in my chest, though the interior shifts without me seeing, between one blink of the eye to the next. The way the rooms look, the hallways and paths to reach them—I am always slightly lost, as if I am in a familiar place I haven’t visited in a while. A sense of discovery intermingled with half-forgotten déjà vu. The way one recognizes an old friend even through layers of translucent years blurring their features.

I don’t know what lies outside the front door. I never think to turn the knob. And even when I do reach out, I forget, the way a dream exists and then is forgotten in the space of a breath.

There is a kitchen with groaning wooden shelves laden with ash-bottomed pots. Sometimes a warm afterglow lingers against my skin as if the cooked food has just been carried out of the room, the hint of food-scent brushing my nostrils and coating my tongue. My bare feet trace the hallways outside a warren of connected bedrooms, their pastel-covered beds tucked together so tightly I could walk from one room to the other and the other on and on without touching the floor. The covers are sometimes pushed back as if awaiting the weight of a sleeper, sheets creased and pillows dented. Shadowed sitting rooms are clothed in jewel-colored drapes in shades of ruby and emerald. Tall mahogany bookcases line their walls, stuffed full of books with uncracked spines and gold-lettered titles in languages I’ve yet to learn.

In the heart of the house, a tower rises, a twisting staircase in its center reaches the sun-dappled room above. I spend hours curled up there, wrapped in light, a silent sanctuary painted in dappled gold.  Its window overlooks the walled garden out back.

The house is built atop a hill, and the garden drapes down the back of it like a billowing skirt, terraced and fountained, with nooks and ponds and leaf-shrouded stone rooms all the way down to the gate at the bottom. I’m not sure if the gate is locked or unlocked.  I don’t think to try and open it.  

Blooming flowers in colors that shouldn’t exist flourish in profusion. My fingers sink into the rich loam just to feel its damp crumble. Small creatures swim in the ponds: frogs, fish, tiny crabs scuttling out the corner of my eyes, some with too many eyes or joints that bend in odd directions. The glint of too-sharp teeth or the sheen of gleaming skin breaks the water’s surface.

I walk down the hallways, ever-changing patterned wallpaper shushing under my fingertips; I walk through the garden, the whisper of soft grass against my ankles. Time passes, marked only by changes in the house.

Rooms are boarded off now with slabs of rough wood. First one. Two. More. I don’t know who decides when it is time, who hammers the nails in. I turn the corner, and it is already blocked off. I press against the wooden boards, but they don’t yield; thick splinters dig into the lines of my palms. Through the gaps, I see remnants of memories in a half-finished meal on a table or photos fading on the walls. The kitchen counters are dirty, then clean, then dirty again. Dust coats every surface. My hands leave trails in passing, and dark shadows grow under the half-moons of my nails, streak against the life-lines of my palm.

Then, between one beat of the heart and the next, the staircase to the tower is boarded up. The scream leaves my throat before I am aware of it, and I pound my fists against the wooden boards, smashing my knuckles again and again until blood wells up from my pores. A board loosens. Falls. I squeeze through the small gap. Take a step. The floors creak with that ominous groan that announces it can’t take my weight anymore. Staring up into the dark recesses of the tower that used to be my refuge, I grieve its loss and grow angry at my cowardice.

I scream again, again, and the sound bounces off the walls, the echoes distorted, reflecting and refracting until the sound becomes unrecognizable, until there are voices that are not my own screaming back at me.

I don’t know where the front door is anymore.

In the garden, thick algae choke the ponds and streams. I grab at it, green-black slime squishing in fetid clumps in my fists. The algae grows back, spreading, spreading. The flowers fade into the pale-brown of old bones, and dry grass crunches under my feet, slicing small cuts between my toes. The black-mirror surface of the water is still. Silent. I pull the weeds, faster, faster, tearing them out in clumps, sun hot against the nape of my neck but for every one I pull, ten more poke their curling heads out from the clay-laden soil. A sob is trapped at the base of my jaw.

I look at the gate at the bottom of the hill, considering.

A small hand slips into my grasp. My child, though I don’t remember the birth nor the father.

I was alone. Now I am not.

They have always been there, they tell me.

I nod. You’re right, I say. I must have remembered wrong. I have always loved you. I don’t remember not loving you.

I know this child is mine. They are younger, still wobbly on their feet, language garbled in their throat. They are older, fabricated by my expectations, sharp eyes and sharper tongue. Girl, boy, both, none, dark-haired, fair-haired. They change, but in each iteration, they are mine. I know this, as I know this house.

I want them to play here, the way I used to. But it’s not the same anymore. When they play, the ever-growing weeds obscure them, the delicate skin of their bird-bone wrists pricked with thistle spines, bare feet caked in cracked-dry mud. Perhaps my child might be light enough to climb the tower stairs, but I don’t take them there. Instead we play hide-and-seek in the remaining rooms of the house. I can never find them even though I look and look. The floor shifts under my feet, changing the position of the walls and obscuring the child from my view. You’re terrible at this game, they say. Their laughter rings down the hallways, the reverberation a warped-echo of my long-lost screams.  

I tell them stories of how it used to be, but they can’t sit still long enough to listen. Their ears are pricked to something only they can hear. Look, they say, but I can’t see what they’re pointing at. Sometimes, I hear them talking, but there is no one else there.  

Cameras now glint in the shadowed corners of the house, watching us, our movements, reading our lips. We talk in code, so complex we can’t even parse our own words at times, meanings flashing past our ears. Still, we nod, pretending to understand.  

The house threatens to fall upon us at any moment. We keep playing, a snarl-smile across the blades of our teeth, our self-aware movements jerky, frenetic.

I don’t try to find the front door.

I don’t go outside the gate.

Every time I even think to do so, the child grasps my hand and leads me away.

Let’s play, they say.

I don’t know this game, I say.

I don’t know.

I don’t.