Speaker 1: I came to ontal that felt like a chessboard eaten
at the edges. The squares warped, as if someone had
been playing with time and left the board to dry
in the sun. Teal saw light pulled from more places
than I could find than in clinical while red accents
blinked and died at the periphery like wounds. Reopening. The
fog was the first force I understood. It curled around
my ankles, cold and quiet, as if it had always
been waiting for me to stop running. For a long minute.
I simply laid there and let the cold spool across
my skin until I could name nothing but the sensation
of being misplaced the question. While my hear rose like
smoke and settled into my throat like something I was
supposed to swallow. The foise meled of stale, caught in
candy and rust, appearing I had never thought I would
recognize as intimate. Hanging mirrors leaned and answered without honesty.
Their reflections were generous with omission. My own face appeared pale,
hollow of cheek, a dended locket visible at my sternum,
and then each mirrors soten the portrait until it became
someone almost like me and not me at all. Names
tease the ages of those reflections, smudged wherein it might belong,
as if some one had wiped the list clean, but
not the memory of where the letters had been. An
irresistible compulsion tug beneath my rib cage. A little hunk
of the house had taught my chest to obey, and
I stood because not standing seemed like a different kind
of surrender. Corridors of warped glass stitched the foy into
a maze. In some mirrors, my eyes were brighter than
it felt. In others they were older, yellowed with a fatigue.
I did not recognize every surface, remembered a face that
could have been mine, of someone I once back passed
in the street. There was an insistence in the way
the mirrors angled look closer the world cap saying with
that sound, I pressed my pond to one pain and
felt the col give of expectation where a name should
have been written, and the glass it was rubbed raw,
as though someone had tried and given up. The house
did not let me leave the thought half formed memory
and s bold a small, dishonest ways, and I remembered
the feel of paper in my hands, folded unread, warm
from a pocket. I had meant to say sorry, I realized,
and the realization did not so much arrive as the
cataloged small parlor waited behind a curtain of thirds that
shimmered like the tail of a dying comet. On a table,
folded notes were stacked with the precision of a ledger,
each one board date. I recognized the numbers, forming a
quiet accusation against an old diversion of myself who had
been too clever at rationalization to confess. They were warm,
as if replaced only moments before I found them. The
rule of the place became evident, without ceremony. Every unspoken
sorry had been written down, and each demanded acknowledgment before
it would release itself back into the world. I touched
a note and felt the imprint of someone else's thumb
as much of saliva at the coroner, like a relic
of hesitation. The house's appetite was methodical, not ravenous. A
catalog debts unexpected payment in an alc of mirror cradled
my dented silver locket, spended and magnified until the metal
looked monumental. When I reached for it. The reflection kept
the locket just out of reach and fall me to
notice details I had leaned away from for years, the
tiny seam at the hinge, the faint handprint inside that, the
lawn to a person whose name I had never said aloud.
The locket was a talisman I had used to root
myself to the less painful side of memory. Here it
served as the house reference point, a key to the
particular architecture of my avoidance. The fun house did not
deal in abstractions. It rearranged rooms according to the exact
shape of the things I refused to fit into sentences.
Something moved at the edge of the gallery, a tilt
of a head where shadow met stage curtain. The keeper
watched with the patience that had been practiced for censuries.
It held itself like an accountant who enjoyed arithmetic to
the point of cruelty, measuring pauses and catalog in a
way I shifted my weight from foot to foot. Its
grin was a painted scene that could not be entirely
trusted to follow a human expression. The presence of the
small figure, the laughing clum with the ledger behind its ass,
made corridors tighten in doors that I had not noticed
begin to close, as if taking attendants. Each closure felt
like a reminder that a vision was now inventory, and
I had more items due than I had coins to
pay with. The first de man arrived at a mouth
shaped door, massive and exaggerated teeth, roomed in red like
a curtain of flesh. It breathed a warm, low harm,
and from its FURTI promise of exchange echoed. Speak an
apology aloud, and the house will accept the tithe Standing
before it, I felt the old nervousness settle into ritual.
Confessing would be both surrender and relief. But surrender here
had accost that the house would name later. The idea
of putting an apology into the air, of letting it
bruise the silence between my ribs was both monstrous and
oddly simple. When I formed the shape of the name
I had kept folded in my pocket for years, the
room convolved, and something inside me loosened. The keeper's smile
widened with the satisfaction of a ledge balanced, and the
teeth of the doorway closed in the shape of a
satisfied mouth. The price paid was not only words. The
house took with a tidy, efficient hand, A slice of
memory flict and fell from the edge of my perception.
A picnic in a park that I could no longer
place exactly when it had happened. My watch, the worn
leather piece at my wrist that had always told me
time and therefore manners, was gone. It strap left the
floor like a surrender token. The sensation the house removed
was smaller than shame, but harder to name. A warmth
that had bound me to someone else then and slipped away.
There was a brittle lightness after the taking, like the
moment after a splinter comes free, and the keeper tucked
each item into a ledger as if filing were seats.
It took pleasure, but did not gloat. It performed the
taking as if it were a civil duty. A corridor
open beyond the mouth door, lined with frames whose faces
were promises of further accounting. The portraits hung like a
rolling complaint, apologies I would eventually have to name each
won A chapter in a ledger that seen den us
fob pulled a long the baseboat and rose and slow
tear the breasts that clung to my shoes for all
that something had been taken. A sliver of weight had
indeed lifted, but the new corridor did not feel lighter.
It felt sharper, more precise, as if the fun house
had gained confidence and I had been reduced to a
catalog of smaller failures. To move forward was to consent
to more subtraction, And yet the compulsion to proceed poles
to my pulse, like a second heart. The mirror small
applied with malicious hospitality. In one my face was younger
and roarer, eyes widen unpracticed. In another, my expression was older, still,
a man who had folded apologies into pockets in Sunhem's tie.
Each reflection offered a different ledger of what I owed
into whom, and between the frames to keep a move,
Like a marginal note, canned in my hesitations and making
them do, the house rearranged itself according to the most
stubborn contours of my regret. It always shifted the hinges
in sympathy with a memory I reached for and could
not quite dominate. It felt like walking through the inside
of my own capacity for evasion, the architecture of avoidance
made concrete. I found a small room where marionettes hung
from the ceiling, porcelain faces frozen in the middle of
expressions I had avoided mirroring for years. One puppet had
a label pin to its back with the date I recognized,
and a smige that mashed the one on a folded note.
Another held its hand in a posture I recognized from
a family photograph I had once looked at too quickly.
The marionettes were not animated, but the suggestion of movement
was constant, a suggestion measured in micro trimmer as that said,
the dust settling and cut the air into thin, trembling ribbons.
All of them seemed to be waiting, not to perform,
but to be forgiven. The room smelled of damn paper
and old glue. I could fill the history of small
cruels as like a pressure behind my teeth. A hallway
of portraits bled downward like watercolors left in the rain.
Names half formed round into streaks, and became illegible in
the lower halves of the canvasses. When I traced a
finger along one frame, the pain did not resist. It
lifted away from the woodlike skin peeling back. The experience
was anticlimactic and obscene in equal measure. The house wanted
the act of admission more than the content to name
to open the hand over. The shape of the apology
was the ritual that let the building keep being what
it was, a machine for settling accounts. The keeper, when
a kim near smelled stale cotton, candy, and wet iron.
It did not speak like a human, but it conducted
a sort of rhetoric with its posture till measure ring
a tiny bell that had no visible striker. The marionette
it help was cracked and smiled with too many teeth.
The interaction between the house and me was not cautioned
so much as choreography. I wore my old evasions like
a costume, and the house on stitched one seam at
a time. I resisted in the small ways I could denial, distraction, rationalization.
Each strategy was cataloged and filed away. The Keeper never scolded,
its simply lock in a room with a single lamp.
The light did not so much illuminate as a keys.
A table held a stack of photographs, edges curling in
a humidity that felt purposeful. Faces in the pictures were
companions to the notes I had handled earlier. People who
had beenoed explanations that I had never given. Memory is
a muscle, and the house made me exercise it against resistance.
With each photograph I flecked through, a plate of experience
shifted in my chest and made a sound like glass
rubbing glass. When I tried to search the pictures for excuses,
the images blurred into the same simple demand acknowledge. The
act of confession narrowed from a moral choice into a
mechanical one, and that change was more terrifying than any admonition.
There was an alcove dedicated to small objects. A chipmuk
whose glaze held a hair line crack that matched the
line of a scar on my lip, A riubbon that
smelled a perfume I had once meant to describe, but
never did. A key with no label on afraid string
that pulled at my memory like a loose jath. These
were the tokens of lives near mine. Each object had
been kept in pockets and benches and hidden drawers, as
if physical things could substitute for sentences not spoken. The
room forced me to confront how many apologies I had
wrapped as trinkets, how many rusted gestures had been left
to gather dust while the people who deserved them had
moved on or moved away. Returned to the mouth door
was not a thought but a momentum. The house is
a way of pulling on your past, like a rope,
and the rope had not tied right at the mouth door.
This time, when I stood before, it did not merely
fill the demand. I felt the architecture of reckoning bearing down.
The keeper's shadow pulled at my feet like ink. The
red inside the doorway looked almost inviting, as a footever,
lay with them would be easier than the arithmetic of afordance.
I reached the shape of an apology and did something
I had always avoided. I said the name of the
person I had hurt, and the reason I had not
omitted it. The sound of the name was not the
relief I had imagined. It was the cutting of a stitch.
The room convulsed the wall poles like a throat's wallowing,
and for an instant the entire funhouse felt balanced on
a single terrible hinge. When the house took its due afterward,
it did not announce the theft. A pocket of a memory
slipped away, leaving a faint hollowness, like a missing tooth.
The watch was gone, and strangely, a sliver of warmth
that had held like a private lamp was gone as well.
I felt lighter in one sense and more exposed in another.
The keeper filed what it had taken with meticulous hands
and returned to its ledger satisfaction, balanced and tidy. The
corridor that opened afterward was longer and lined with frames
whose faces were set further away than before. The fog up.
My feet tightened like a leash. The house had accepted
one apology, but kept me within the system of accounts. Redemption,
it seemed, was always partial. Here I moved forward because
there was nowhere else to go, not because I had
found courage, but because the path required it. The mirrors
became less traitorous and more like witnesses, showing me not
alternate lives so much as angles of the same failure.
Sometimes a reflection offered a small mercy, a moment when
my ex freshmon softened, as if the act of admission
had begun to alter the muscle memory of my face.
I kept the dented locket in my hand, learning its weight,
as if for learning the feel of my own heart.
The keeper watched from the margins with the patience of machinery.
Its laughter high and distended, verted through the dark like
a measuring tape being drawn tight. The fun house did
not promise absolution so much as accounting. I left with
pockets lighter in a ledger that had been adjusted, nails
filing away the edges of refusal. The house had eaten
apologies and left me with the after taste of metal
and something like a possibility for quiet. The fog clon
even after the dose closed behind me. It would follow,
gather on porches, nest in closets until the next reckoning.
The laughter persisted in the thinnest part of my hearing,
a punctuation between my heart beats. I stepped into a
corridor that curved away, the frames becoming smaller and the
lights dim into reluctant eel. The keep a spell chinin
somewhere behind me, polite and ineswerable. I will not say
that I was cured. The house had only the power
to balance accounts, not to erase consequence. What it did
was force me to hold the shape of my own omissions,
to catalog them, and either pay all live under them
paid weight. The corridor ahead was an invitation and a sentence.
I resettled the dent to locket against my palm, and
felt the phrased string of the unlabeled key rub against
my fingers like a promise I had yet to keep.
The fog curled up one last time around my shoes,
as if to remind me how easily it could follow
my step, and somewhere beyond the glass of Venes distorted
laugh the roll like a record WoT by too many plays.
That laughter will come for me again, and I will
come for it, because avoidance is a habit that knees constant,
a making in the end thing the house taught me
it was not piety but practicality. Apologies take shape when
they are spoken, and when they are not, they calcify
into architecture. There is a cost, because you have to
be willing to lose what you used to hide behind.
The ledger sits now in some dark drawer of the
fun house, a neat stock of receipts for the life
I have yet to reorder. I left a little less
heavy and a little more exposed to the weather of
other people. The laughter will still echo when the night
is then, and the corridor will still invite return. Subscribe
to descend further. I tell myself in the quieter moments,
not as a mantre, but as a warning. The house
will be there when I stumble again. Patient and pedantic,
ready with a ladger and a bell, I came awake
in a place that remembered what I would not. The
floor under my shoes gave like wet paper, and they
are smelled of stale cotton, candy, and down ledge of pages.
Fog celt round my feet, as if the house werekshalines,
low and deliberate, and somewhere beyond the soft churn of ventilation,
a larger wound in a nut of itself, bright at
the edges, the way child's giggle becomes an echo of
something older. I did not know how long I had
been asleep. I only knew I had been brought, and
brought for a reason I could not yet name. The
gallery infeld before me, like a salon of accusations. Frames
and diminishing sizes were seeding along a corridor whose vanishing
points seemed to sharpen toward my chest. Each frame held
a face, Each face held a weight. Some were painted
in the delicate grain of cracked oil. Others were rendered
in mirrors half distorted by age and the funhouse glass.
Names were stitched into the brass plaques beneath them, tiny
letters bleeding down the metal, as if the captions themselves
were dissolving into something that wanted to be forgotten. There
were blanks, two frames with empty plaques, and ribbons tied
around the corners. The absence felt pointed, and index finger
tappened against a conscience I kept in the dark. I
moved because the corridor invited motion. The house had a
polite compulsion. Are currently cooked at the soles of my
shoes and made stillness and anxious act. Each depth magnified
the hush. My hands found their weight in my pockets,
fingers brushing a worn leather watch, the dented silver locket
I could not bring myself to open. They were anchors
I carried, like the statement of a life that had
been neat and evasive. I kept looking at the portraits,
at faces I recognized in others I didn't want to.
There was a slippery, immediate question pressed into the air.
Who did I avoid? And why did the house keep
their faces on display? I knew how to be tidy
with memory, polite with regret, apologies, tucked into envelopes, never
said sentences, softened and set aside until they hardened into
habits of omission. In the frames, those emissions were not
sued or softened. They were rendered stark and vivid. Where
I had once smoothed a moment into acceptable neglect, the
gallery placed to loop over it and magnified the edges.
The house did not allow me to gloss. It arranged
my evasions into geometry in light, and the geometry kept
funneling me forward. A door opened onto a kitchen, not
as I remembered kitchens, but as memory might punish them.
A long table set for a meal that had never
been finished, Chairs pushed back at odd angles, plates half
covered in the residue of conversations I had deflected. The
friar hummed like a distant heartbeat. Neon burners flickered in
model teel ens on, and the thin red thread that
a definable accent as seemed to carry it through my life,
wing across a napkin and out the table into nothing.
As I passed the place settings, objects tilted toward me
as a pointing with accusatory insistence. A chip cup that
had been turned down when a hand reached for comfort
a cloth knaw conforded to hide a scrape apology before
claid across a plate, like a timeline that had been
cut prematurely. The scene distorted in a way of a
fulm real plate back at the wrong speed. I watched
a moment I had relegated to the footnotes of my
life repeat as cruelty rendered crisp. I had believed a
certain omission harmless. The kitchen rwound a memory until I
could fill the warmth of a shoulder. I had not
turned toward the hollow pivot where an apology should have been.
Objects on the table became small jewlies. They did not shout,
They only leaned in. They made me feel my flippant
rationalizing self as an adequate shelter against the truth. From
the kitchen, I drifted into a room where marionettes hung
like sins on display. The suspended dolls bore the features
of people I had known. An ex girlfriend's jaw, a
childhood friends slumped shoulders, a parent's half smile, and they
were posed in repeated tiny gestures. A puppet would tilt
its head the way someone does when only part of
a truth is being received. Another would shelter an invisible
child with an arm that moved just enough to suggest protection,
but not enough to sustain it. Each marionette was stopped
mid gesture, paused so that the entire cruelty of interruption
could be examined. The keeper watched from the edge of
the room. It did not stride or stock. It measured
like an account and counting margins. Its face paint was
cracked and fine as old plaster. Smile was a permanent
seemed drawn too wide. It had a ring master's coat
that hummed in the tea light, and in one hand
it held a cracked porcelain marionette whose strings were frayed
like dried roots. The keeper's presence was ceremonial, and I felt,
for the first time since waking, the impossible smallness of
the teeth of my avoidance. The marionettes moved without voice.
Each motion was one I had withheld, a hand reaching
for help, drawn an embrace given with russerv a. Silences
left where name should have been spoken. The keeper's counting
was quiet as a metronym. It did not need to
raise his voice. The room provided the ledger in the
gestures of those they had from the poppets performed their
paused apologies, and the performance was enough to make my
heart a live thing in effort. A lacquer booth sat
at the center of the next chamber, gleaming black at
the edges, with a slot like a mouth in a
brass machine whose gaze turned with the politeness that set
my teeth on edge. Slips of paper lay in a
eat stat beside an inkless pen. There was a machine
that ate gestures. The house called the apology booth, a
place that welcomed offerings but refused the counterfeit. I took
a slip, roared it and im I had kept quite
for years, and fitted into the slot. The machine accepted
the paper with the same civil indifference as an embezzer
counting coins. It chewed the edge of the apology and
swallowed it into itself with a metallic echo. For a moment,
I believed that motion mattered, that the house would take
a token and my ledger would be lighter. Instead, the
boots bat a thin, translucent scrapped back through a second aperture.
The scrap was smaller and grayer than the name I
had written. The house did not measure quantity in misery, temperature, sincerity, warmth,
the willingness to be. I could feel the failure like
a physical bruise. I had practiced economy with remorse for years,
knowing how to make a regret small enough to tuck away.
The booths would accept nothing less than ruinous honesty. When
my paper returned muffled and paled, the room shifted. Light
sharpened to a teal cyane knife. Objects in the booth
rattled like teeth. The keeper's breath was closer beyond the booth.
Ledgers rose like columns, binding stitched into the skins of
the books. The pages, rated with names and marginaliad acclled
like small vote scriptures. The keeper took them with a
kind of board care, Flipping through with the gloved forefinger.
The traced debts like an order to checking balances. As
the pages turned ripple spread, I watched the effect of
an unspoken apology propagate through scenes of my life, like
a drop stone through still water. A partners till towards
solitude Attell's truss shaped into warness apparent, small humiliation magnified
into distance. Each ledger entry was not a static word.
It was a cause and an effect, a private economy
of harm that the house now made public. My memories
began to fragment while the ledges opened. I saw the
edges of a memory, and then the thing it burst
in some one else, A lost job because I had
failed to defend a colleague, a friendship eroded by a
dismissal offered with a laugh that disguise cruelty. The ledges
did not accuse for the sake of accusation. There were
diagram systematic showing how without name had compounded into a pattern.
The house tightened its geometry. The walls leaned the way
athroat does inward when following engles shortened. The corridor I
thought I had been traveling lengthened in impossible increments. The
keeper's voice was not loud, it did not need to be.
The rustle of pages and the metallic creak of its
bell were enough to set the air under my robs
to flutter. There was a door, then, like a mouth
carved into wood, varnish worn away at the lips, as
if many hands had pressed there. It loomed, inviting in
the way a confessional night. It demanded something that felt
heavier than the slips of paper. The vision of a
name that would not be softened by excuse. I felt
the compulsion as a pressure behind the eyes, the body's
need to breathe. The new oxygen. Naming was not an
abstract act here, it was a force that re arranged space.
The corridors light bloed raw and exposed tea like an
open vein. I pressed my pond to my chest and
felt the old habit of avoidance in every muscle of
reddiness to reply with half truths and apologies that would
buy me time. When I opened my mouth, the name
did not come with a sentence. It came as a
physical thing, abrupt, like a stone frow, an interstial glass.
The house received it with a sound that was a
little like relief and a little like the pop of
a blister. The walls responded as if exhaling a hell breath.
The room reconfigured into something older and more private. Memory
collapsed inwards and were built itself around the admission. For
the first time, the portrait not merely acknowledged a rohm,
but began to reveal an origin why I had not
spoken the small mosses I took at other people's expense,
The calculations that seemed at the time survivable. Admission was
not a clean aubsolution. The house did not reward me
with immediate release. Instead, the architecture around me decomposed and
after image corridors that hummed with echoes of the person
I had named, fragments of their life pressed up against
the walls like ghost photographs. I recognized details I had
never allowed myself to recall a coat leth on a chair,
the scent of lemons soap from a hand. I had
not defended a laugh that stopped when I turned away.
Each confession opened another door. It was not closure so
much as progress in Alijah that had only begun to
be balanced on a landing outside the new passage, that
keeper stood waiting with a small brass bell capped in
its palm. It placed the bell on the step between us,
as if mocking a transaction. The bell's surface was dull,
its tongue missing a chip. The keeper did not speak,
but it had tilted to that precise and conny angle
that made the auditorium of my conscience shiver. The gesture
suggested that my first true apology was an installment, not
a settlement. The bell's mute tone echoed the house's promise,
you will not be done. I walked away from that
landing into a corridor, pulsing with the after image of
the person I had named. The light here was made dawn,
not quite day, but no longer the corrosive teal of
the naming threshold. The corridor was quieter, but quieter, and
that brittleway sound becomes when it has been held too long.
The portraits in the frames I had passed early now
bore not only faces, but the feigned overlay of new captions.
Consequences reframed themselves as a series of doorways. I realized
in the immediate relief I had felt was porous confession
unlatched the next room, rather than bold the old one shut.
I thought of the things I had minimized in life,
and howelessly I can rearrange the moral furniture to avoid discomfort.
The fun house was an inexorable tudor. It taught me
that pologies were not rhetorical devices. They were recalibrations of being.
Each name my voice required physical reckoning. Time returned to
those that had diminished attention, redirected. Gestures that had been
withheld now demanded a house exacted payment, not in terror,
but in the labor of returning small things to their
rightful owners. My penance was not suffering for suffering's sake.
It was the labor of restitution, awkward and convenient, necessary.
And yet even as I accepted a work, the keeper's
presence reminded me that there was no final ledger where
I might lay down my small burden some walk away light.
The keeper's smile was a seam in its amusement was precise.
It placed a bell on the landing like a bookmark,
and step back into the corridor shadow. The house had
opened a new passage, and with it the recognition that
each true apology demanded another reckoning. I moved through the
after room at corridor with a hand braced against the wall,
feeling for texture, for the temperature changes that told me
I was alive and still being measured. At the end
of the corridor, the air changed again. It tasted of
wet paper and all promises. There was the suggestion of
a wide but from place beyond a ride, perhaps, or
another room of mirrors waiting in teel and read I
carried to Bell's notion in my chest. Progress counted but
never complete. The house did not mock me so much
as instruct me in an economy I had avoided for
too long. I understood with the weary clarity. I had
not expected that the work of apology is cumulative and iterative,
and that reckoning rarely culminates entirey closure. The laughing coan
remained and engraving in my aftermath. Its laughter threaded the
corridors like a seam of wire that held the building together.
I had given the house a name, and the house
had taken that name and began to do what it
had been built to do. We order memory into responsibility.
I walked on each but full of small agreement to
the terms it set. I was not absolved. I had
simply begun to pay. The corridor of nins did not
promise light, only the slow grinding utility of labor. The
work would go on, so would the laughter, and somewhere
inside me a new faculty, work that could name, and
then repair, and then name again. The house had not
fed me a moral tidy ending. It had administered an
impossible kindness, one that required discomfort, that insisted on physics
rather than platitudes. My chest ache with the knowledge that
the simplest gestures in life had been for years, are
most expensive, and that to set things right would take
more than an evening in a fun house. But as
the corridor narrowed and the portraits blowed into the flank
of my own long shadow, I felt the fragile thing
the house offered, a way forward that demanded my voice,
my hemil, and the slow daily work of being small
enough to give what you have been given. Long ago,
I come awake in a corridor of glass and reflected
shame fall culling around my feet. The light is wrong
teal cyand lamps burn like drowned stars, and wherever the
like raises, there is a red accent, like a bruise.
I am merely meres of thirty four slight and stooped
a warm leather wrist. Warshly saw my wrist, a dent
at silver, a locket warm against my sernum. And the
mirrors already known me. They know the way I avoid
I contact, the way I rub them a long index
finger when the whirl presses. They do not flinch at
what I have become skilled at hiding. The gallery is narrow,
narrower than it looks from the doorway, a rabbit worn
lined with tall mirrors set into cob frames. As I
step forward, the glass breathes names, creep like condensation, letters
forming where there ought to be only reflection. I can
see fragments of myself in each pane. The hollow cheeks,
the day's old stubble, the pale skin with ashen anduder tones,
hazel eyes with a green fleckscown, the room tired and
slightly hooded. The mirrors do not show me as I remember.
These images tilt and werecast the same event a dozen ways,
until recognition becomes accusation. At first, I cannot place the names.
They are faint, a pale script crawling from the corners inward,
as if the mirrors draw each letter up from the
house itself. One name slows the blood in my throat.
It is familiar enough to snag my mind, familiar enough
to make my chest ache, and yet my mouth cannot
place the face that belongs to it. The house insists.
Each step presses a precise weight into my souls. The
floor hums with a low base, like a distant heartbee.
I am compelled to move deeper. The faces in the
mirrors rearrange like weather. A child's face becomes the contour
of a woman. I owe a kindness to conversation, fragments, phrases.
I rerode in my head to ease guilt flash behind
glass like film frames, and every time I reach the
sturdy the image, it slept sideways, avoiding my correction. I
realize then that avoidance is its own trick. The more
I try to frame what happened into something softer, the
more the house will refuse the rewrite memory. Here is
a mechanical thing. It resists smoothing in a mirrored alco
A laugh catch is at the edge of the glass.
I am brittle a child's giggle underscore bessel baritone ham.
My own reflection tilts its head exactly as I did.
The night are turned away. There is a vertical scar
at the left lip, a small detail I had normalized
into my face. The room pulls the moment closer my
knees remember how I stood. The faces tilt away when
I try to fix them, leaving me to confront the
versions of events I had spun. To keep the guilt
from grinding its teeth, I linger where the mirrors deepen
into alcoves. Each curved glass offering a different angle of
the same avoidance. A conversation softened, a truth left and said,
a hand turned away. The images are intimate in their cruelty.
They do not shout. They render each omission in small,
precise gestures. Hands that almost reached, sentences that stopped, eyes
that slid past. The house uses those half actions to
build its case against me. The gallery's central alcove resolves
to abstract into the particular. One mirror, larger and older
than the rest, stops the air with its stillness. Its
silver ring is modeled, and when it clears, there is
a face that knocks the air out of me. Exact
bone structure, a woman with a jaw set like flint,
eyes that had once looked at me with disappointment instead
of forgiveness. She is the person I kept a distance
with cheap explanations in the silence that felt safe. The
mirror aligns the memory I had softened into a concrete wound.
What I had thought were impressions, little slights and evasions
becomes specific. The house replays the finality of a night
I had written into a less culpable version. The moment
is not loud, It is crystalline. I had not yelled
or struck. I had done something more corrosive. I had
chosen comfort over accountability. The mirror does not let me
denature that it presents the meeting without the soft coat
of rationalization, and the face looks back with the exact
help my silence afflicted. Beyond the mirrors is a small parlor,
a cracked porcel in Marionnette sits upread on a velvet
back chair. One fragile hand forever posed a brass tag,
hands at it, str like a ledger. Bookmark names areshed
into the tag, neat and almost clerical, and they trail
often to smudged lines that look like and paid balances.
The Marionnett's painted smile is shipped. Its wooden joints are
scrub raw, where hands had once moved the strings. My
initials are carved into the wood, small and embarrassed in
the place of the heart a ledger. Eyes open in
the parlor table, each page scordon, column's name, date, offense, apology, ote.
The house has reduced my avoidance to rows of ink
and numbered depth. It is perversely orderly, like an accountant
who is spent along Droella's life. Cata loggings in the
marionnet acts as both witness and auditor. The brass tug
trembles when I breathe near it, as though my presence
is another entry the ledger wants accounted for. It is then,
as if summoned by the very act of reading, that
the keeper steps from shadow. He is taller than his
painted proportion should allow, a ringmaster stitched into something more sinister.
Porcelain paint flakes off his anchilar cheek bones, a permanent
such smile is painted too wide as seem like a
crack running through the right eye. His hair is bleached
white with till dye, the tips wild and teas into
a ring around the head. He moves with the precise
tilt of someone who counts distance in debts and interest.
The keeper cat locks me with a voice that is
two things at once, a high, distant giggle ovolaid with
a slow bartone. He does not shout. He marks the
Ledger with tiny theatrical flourishes, measuring me more like inventory
than enemy. His gloves are oil stained. His tail cup
hangs in a theatrical ruin. In one hand he holds
a cracked porcel in marionette like the one on the chair.
In the other a tiny brass bell that rings without motion.
The sound is ceremonial, and it makes the ledger's pages
lift like leaves in a quick wind. He offers a
choice in the manner of someone offering a form to
be signed, Confess now or allowed house to extract. The
apology by harsher means there is no mercy in the offer,
only procedure. The keep is perfunctory. Cruelty is theatrical, and
that thet makes the stakes personal. It is accountability dressed
in carnival finery. And I feel the barnacle weight of
my avoidance press against the bones of my throat. Under
that pressure, I find words I did not know were
still lodged in my mouth. The apology comes halting and raw,
not the clean, rehearsed absolution I sometimes gave to myself
in private. But something frayed and honest, my voice said,
is as I admit the exact injury. The mirror unmasked,
the gallery convulses, glass trembling as memory reorganizes itself into consequence.
Whether I had been floating impressions, there is now and
not a fact. A heart I did not name until
the house force my hand. The admission does not produce
an immediate absolution. Instead, the room reacts with an almost
biological motion. A scrap of stained paper flutters free from
the maroonette's lap and lands in my palm, warm and brittle.
It smells faintly of damn paper and sail, cotton candy,
and the informs a single, careful line and apology. For
a moment, there is a private hush where the house
seems to receive the offering instead of tormenting me with it.
My thumb returns the paper's edges, and for the first
time since I woke here, I feel the ard lightness
of something amo word relief is not a clean thing.
As a paper warms under my skin, another name reappears
on the ledger like a new charge. The brass tack trembles,
and afresh entry etches itself across the margin. The marrionnate
wooden head inclined, registering new debt. As if the house's
at appetite is inexhaustible. Reconciliation here is transactional. Each apology
buys a sliver of quiet, but the price is never
paid in full. The ledger is insistent and consumptive. One
phrase placed in my hand, another wound revealed. The gallery
settles for a breath, and then creaks into motion again.
Where once a door had set flushed against the wall,
a mouse shaped aperture cracks open its threshold, saying a deep,
intimate rere It casts a shadow, like a promise in
a threat. The shape of the opening is it seen
in its suggestion, A doorway that resembles a math at
one's speech. The house indicates its appetite for more than
paper scraps. It wants the sound of my admission to
be tasted and swallowed. The keeper's larder goes on in
a distance, high and childlike, then dip into the lower
register that feels like a calculation. I am compelled forward.
I want to run back toward the foy in the
cold anonymity of not knowing. But each step away only
quickens the house counting the ledger has begun. The rooms
continue to demand. I moved toward the mouth shaped door.
The warm apology folded in my fist like a small,
fragile relic. The corridor narrows again. The mirrors we arrange
into a strobe of possible cells. Sometimes I want to
reconstruct myself into someone less fragile, taller, less steeped, someone
who kept promises and fashioned apologies that could not be
eaten by walls. Instead, I find my hand in the dark,
knob shaped like a lip, the metal cool and sticky.
The house judges me in texture. Behind the lip. There
is pressure at the sensation of being measured in phrases
and confessions. I climb the short stair toward the mouth
door and palls. My reflection delays me. The mirror's alashes
look like tiny currency tacks in my pocket. The key
with no label on afraid string presses against fabric. The
silver locket rose heavy. For a moment, I imagine turning
and walking away, carrying the apology in my palm like
contraband I imagine myself alive with the old skill of avoidance.
The house corrects the imagination with a small, surgical sound.
The bell the brass than imprecise. The decision is no
longer solitary. It is ceremonial. The mouth creaks open and
I fill the air change. It is warmer here, saturated
with the scent of damp paper and rusted metal caught
in candy turned iron inside. There will be more faces,
more ledgers, more marionette with my initials carved into them,
until the letters become a pattern across shelves. But for
the first time, I move toward confession with the steadier
pace my voice finding form in the chamber of the
house is shaped for it. It is no triumph, only
the necessary movement of accounting. The house will not release
me one at hand at what it asks. It will
instead shift the terms. The ledger will ask for names
I have not yet reconcile, and each return apology will
reveal a new emission. That is the commerce of this place,
a slow, inexorable trade of speech for silence, relief bought
in increments. I hold the stain scrap and watch the
ink dry, already knowing another line will crawl itself into
the ledger as surely its breath follows sigh. I go on.
The gallery falls behind me like a palm, closing the
mirrors told and offer me a final and settling kindness.
They do not flatter, They do not let me pretend
the thing I have given was enough. The keepest laughter
is the room's metronome. As I step into the mouth
and feel the house turn its pages. There is no
resolution here in the sense I once hoped for it.
The apology in my hand is both victory and proof
of incompleteness. The ledger will keep tolly, The marionette will
wait its wooden joints, remembering my initials as a new
notch in a larm on winding belt. I have learned
that saying sorry changes something inside me. It is not
in a single motion. Erase with avoidance is eaten. The
process is slow, lit by teal cyan bulbs, an accented
and bruised red, textured like film grain, and edged with
the quiet of a clown's echoing bell. I walk toward
the next room because the house insists, and because the
motion is the only sentence I have left complete. The
groove of my watch bites into my wrist. The locket
swings dented and constant. My thumb rubs along my index
finger out of habit, and it stead is my palm
on the next door. The gallery has taught me one thing. Then,
accountability here is not mercy, but it is not cruelty
without purpose. It is a ledger that a man's return,
and then, without flourish, sets a new figure at the margin.
When I move, the house moves with me. The laughter follows.
The mirrors hold faces until I name them. The mari
Ownett will always return a scrap of apology, and another
name will appear on the ledger. I have at least
learned to speak the woods that once lodged like stunts
in my throat. That small motion, that uncertain holding line,
makes the house quip a breath. In that breath, I
sense a partial claiming of myself, flawed and incomplete. And
I keep walking into the next door because the corridor
is endless, and because I am no longer able to
leave everything unsaid. The gallery of faces recedes behind me,
the mouth shaped or close like a slow blink. I
feel the house as tally beneath mys gain, and I
know the ledger will not be satisfied. Yet the apology
in my palm remains warm and fragile. Outside the smudge glass,
beyond the teal cyan fog and of red accents, there
is a corridor I might have walked before one wor
of oodent would have let everything calcify. Here in the
house that eats apologies, the cost is kept in inklwood
and paper, and I am learning the measure of what
it takes to be unbodened, even a fraction at a time.
I step into the stairwell, and the keeper's bill rings
once politely. The sound follows me like a punctuation mark.
I am compelled to continue to accept that this accounting
may never be complete, but that speech, when offered with
weariness and true weight, is something the house will consume.
I do not leave the corridor hale, but I leave
with the line in my hand and the knowledge that
I can at least keep returning to the page. The
nightmare does not end here. The ledger remains, the laughter trails,
the house settles in its counting, and I move forward
and steady, but speaking each admission a small, necessary abrasion
against the bone of what I avoided for so long.
The Paula had no and therefore no promise. It was
a low seals room under a sky that had been painted.
Beneath the carnival tent, a faint roiling mural of teal
unsigh and cloud strided would shadow. I remember the way
the fog first found my Shu's thin fingers of vapor
that move like an apology avoided insistent, cool, reluctant to lift.
The lights were not light so much as bruises of
color teal washed against the varnished wood at a cruel
red that round edges and teeth. The air smelled of
stale cotton, candy, rust, damp paper somewhere distant a bell
child without a hand. The sound had no warmth. Dozens
of marionnets hung from the ceiling, like a congregation frozen
mid confession. This swung in a slow, in different tidal motion,
and strings taught except where a breeze. If there was
a breeze, was permitted to make them sigh. They were
not cheerful that phases were finished in the same manner
as the house's smile. Two precise, two pointed porcelain skin
with tiny hair lined cracks. Their eyes held a flaccid
intel diligence, too patient to be kind, My mouth went dry.
A part of me made the dutiful inventory of danger
damp boards, well scented fog, the way my watch gleamed
back at me and felt suddenly vulgar, even as another
more private part calog names in the back of my throat.
The first puppet I saw wore a dented silver locket.
The locket hung at the puppet's throat like a surprise.
It did not belong to the stitch clothing, which was threadbare, unpatched,
as if the puppet had been repaired many times. I
knew that locket. I knew its dent, and the way
the hinge stuck, the tiny neck, and the silver that
fit like a fingerprint. The recognition sat in me with
the cold intelligence of something that had been waiting for
me to notice. The marionettes were not mere likenesses. They
were repositories. They held small things pulled from pockets and memory.
The locket was a key to a ledger I had
not yet seen. The room arranged itself at once to
accommodate my attention. Puppets swung to present their faces to me.
String shifted with a whisper of cloth, each hand of thread,
and would seem to take account of me, as if
I had passed through an order. I felt as though
some one had put me on a table, lifted my wrists,
and gone through a slow, deliberate checklist avoidance. The thing
that had kept me aflow. The rationalizations I had practiced
in private, felt suddenly as visible as a bruise. When
I looked closer, the cruelty of detail revealed itself in
stubborn increments. Each puppet's face, when examined without hurry, met
someone I had known, not always exactly, but in some
gnawing way at all. I tilted like a college roommates,
a hook of a nose, unmistakably my grandmother's, a smile,
shape of the exact cold that had lived in my
mother's mouth. The stitch name tags dangled from collars like
fresh Gar's neat cursive name soon in crimsoned red. The
thread shivered in the till light. Seeing them was an
odd dance of discovery and a diement. Each tag was
a ledger line I had not expected to finding ton air.
I moved through the rows, within efficient stealth of someone
who did not want to be seen, but could not
stop looking. The marionette tracked me, eyes found me even
when I tried to look away. It was as if
the strings knew how to arrange their faces to be memorable.
The house amplified the sensation that I had been doing
arithmetic in my head, subtracting compassion, dividing blame, hiding up
beneath the folded receipt. Every puppy was a ledger, lying
in three dimensions. Nothing abstract about it. The weight was literal.
At the center of the parlor, on a small lecton
carved with a looping carnival script sat the brass bound ledger.
It was smaller than the kind you would expect to
contain such gravity, and its pages were dense with neat
handwriting and tabulated columns. The brass was called beneath my
finger tips when I dared to touch it. The metal
had collected fingerprints like fossils. The ledger recorded old apologies, names, dates,
a column for reason, one for method, and a third
marked returned. The returned column was nearly empty. My own
name sat beneath a list of emissions, Each entry terres
and precise, like receipts for small cruelties. Beside the ledger
lay afrayed keyon a length of string, familiar and shabby.
My watch, which I had clumsily strapped on in the dark,
felt suddenly less like an object and more like an accusation.
The key fit the hole, and the ledges binding with
the intimacy of a bad habit. There was a geometry
to the room that altered as I read. When adlaned
over the left in the edges of the parlor seemed
to draw him with a slow, patient hunder the marionette,
strings tightened as if to camp breaths. The ledger's pages
were a ledger of the self. Everything that had been avoided,
hidden beneath flip and replies and careful silences, lay in
neat calms the realization that my possessions and memories were
also ledges of currency, a market I had not consented
to make both my limbs and my throat going on.
He arrived like an auditor, the keeper step from the
varnished shadow, a figure assembled from ring us to attire
and the garb of a carnival attendant, tilcut frayed Strepesma's match.
His face paint was poor, slin and cracked. A painted
smile had been stretched as if through too many teeth.
When he tilted his head it was with a precision
of someone used to weighing things. And he carried a
crap puscelin marionette in one oile stained glove, as though
it were allowed, upon which he kept accounts. His eyes
were too black ringed with a scion light that made
every detail of the room both sharper and more absurd.
He made no arrival sand that could be trusted. A
laugh high and childlike at first, underlayed by a low
bartone that seemed to count the air. He did not
speak as much as he recorded. The manner of his
attention was clinical and theatrical at once. He walked the
perimeter of the lectum with the exactness that some were
making notes, and tilted the ledger so the parlor slight
sharpened commerce and dates into little knives. When his gaze
fell on me, it felt like an invoice being presented.
The room tightened. The keeper measured away. My shoulders slumped
in the ways, my eyes flicked to certain names. To
his presence, my rationalizations turned into visible debts. Avoidance was
a lie item that expanded with interest. The ledger he
showed me without words, was not merely a list of
what had not been said. It was a tallly of
cost and consequence. Each omission had wait. When he flicked
a page, new names bled, and, as if in itself exhaled,
pages swelled with tiny, indisputable condemnations. The keeper's brass bell
rang without a motion that made sense. The sound ticked
in my bones and seemed to rearrange the threads above us.
The marionette shifted accordingly, their strings, tuning to the ledger's
new demands. There was a moment small and terrible, when
the room demanded a choice, a puppet's debt, or rather
the splinterful suggested something should step forward, and a plot
from lowered with the memory of a theater remembering an audience.
The pope that faced me was the most intimate of
the lot. Its face cough with the careful cruelty of
a mirror. It wore usclf like the one I owned,
with a single callous stride of red that matched the
smallest accent in my clothing. A dent a silver locket
rested at its throat. I did not speak cloud in
words that readers might imagine. Rather, I enacted the motion
of confession. My mouth moved, my breath arranged itself. Sound
left my body as if I were turning a key.
The house accepted it like currency. The strings slackened at
the instant my contrition was rendered, and the marionette's hands
and clasped a memory that had been compressed into fist
in my chest, unspoiled with the pressure of a released spring. Sudden, vivid,
and terrible. It did not arrive as a gentle film.
It crashed into my senses like cold water, an image
of a face, a touch, the exact weight of a
thing I had not properly acknowledged. The silver locket in
the Pappa stroke slept free and settled into my palm.
It was small and heavier than the metal would suggest,
and a piece of mirrored glass flake from which room
ashad that flashed draw a collection back into me. The
exchange felt straightforward until I saw the ledger again. The
return column had accepted my admission, but had appended a
new cost. A new entry appeared in a margin I
had not known existed. The ledger did not forgive silently.
It appended confession was a transaction that cleared one debt,
only to reveal the scope of debt stillowed. The keeper
flipped pages with a deliberate cruelty. The motion of his
hands was like a judge's names, bled downward and fresh ink,
including one I had worked hard to forget, scribbled in
a hand that trembled enough to feel alive. The ho
sppetite of the house, which I had imagined finite, revealed
itself to be cumulative. When the mario net fragment fell
into my palm, the shard of mirror cut a shallow
line across my skin. The sting was minor compared to
the image. It mirrored, a sliver of a morning I
had ducked away from, the muffled sob of someone I
had dismissed, the exactness of a small cruelty I had
rationalized as necessity for a breath. I let relief and
remorse exist at once. The relief was an animal, quick
and small. The remorse was a larger, colder thing that
sat like stone behind my roobs. I understood with a
clarity that was not kind, that to survive this place,
one omission would not be enough. The keeper turned another page,
ink blurred into new names, as if the ledger were
hungry and had only been fed a taste. The letters darkened,
and the margins full of notes, tiny obervations in a
clerk's hand that translated avoidance into quantity, miss calls and
sent messages, the thin excuses given in rooms that smelled
like laundry. I felt the space between the ledgers lines contract.
The parlor re arranged to emphasize that the house measured
not only what had been denied, but what had been differ.
The truth of it was inevitably simpler and more oppressive
than I had allowed tilling. The truth was not a
door out. It was an opening to more truth. I remembered,
as if pulled by invisible threads, moments I had thought private,
rehearse apologies that had not landed, commuted promises, the small
acts of a mission that had felt like defense. Each
memory arrived with the tactile clarity of the locket's tent,
the exact weight of an evening left early, the tilts
of a face I had not turned back to. The
marionettes did not merely exhibit these recollections. They held them
with the dignity of evidence. The parlor did not glare
a catalog. I said, the frey key back into my pocket.
The motion was an anchor as much as a promise.
The fragments and the returned object weighed in my hand
like evidence. The parlor shifted once more and revealed a
muff shaped doorway in the far wall, and aperture ringked
in pulsing red that as though the house's throat glowed
from within. The mouth breed faintly. The keeper hung back, measuring, cataloging.
For a moment, I mist freed his restraint as mercy.
It was not mercy, it was accounting. I stepped toward
the doorway with my shoulders brace. The mouth shaped or
radiated heat that felt like an accusation. Acknowledgment exposes one
to consequences still to come. The fog swallowed my feet
until I could no longer see them. The teal and
soon washed my genes into a single muted tone, the
reed accent catching like a wound. With each step, the
parlor seemed to reclaim the fragment I had been given,
and to collect new debts. I filled the motion of
my steps with a fragile resolve. They keep moving to
let troof be a thing I paid for, rather than
a thing that on me. At the threshold, I felt
a strange gratitude for the ledgers s cruelty. It demanded accounting,
and in demanding it, it offered a method. The house
did not offer absolution. It offered terms. The terms were
written in pages that would not stop pre filling. The
keeper a figure who alternated laugh with Ledger stood in
the doorway's periphery like an accountant with the well. His
sil wet back lit the teeth of the mouth with
a sear on hallow that made him look smaller and
larger at once. He measured the distance between us, as
if calculating the next entry. I stepped through the mouth
into a corridor that smelled of old paper and rain.
The parlor closed behind me like an eyelid. The marrionette
strings hummed faintly and then stilled in my pocket. The
key shifted against the frayed strain, and the shod of
mirror tuted against the dentered locket pressed its small truth
against my palm. The Ledger's columns would be waiting, New
names would be inked. I understood that to leave this
house in any sense of completion required more than a
single spoken apology. It required facing those names again and
again until the tally thinned, until I no longer had
the stomach to proceed. There was no celebratory light. The
corridor was a compression of teal and charcoal, a slim
place that smelled like wet fabric and nold ink. The
sound of distant laughter followed me like a cadence I
could not keep from hearing. For a long moment, I
allowed myself to imagine a parlor as lesson and the
house's appetite as finite. Then, like a creditor with sly hands,
the house revealed a new page. The Ledger's margins had expanded,
and a name I had hoped would never appear in
old omission, wrapped in secrecy, blood into sight. The keeper's
bell chimed, as if in confirmation. The path forward was
not a release but a binding. The fragments I had
been given were small and precise. They allowed me to
hold the truth of my actions in my hands and
to feel their weight. That weight was both punishment and instrument.
It would anchor me or drum me, depending on the
choices I made. The corridor pulsed, the mouth shaped door
side closed behind me, and the keeper's figure melted into
the carnival steel haze. I felt the house breed around me,
and recognized that the sentence had only just begun. As
I walked, I found the Ledger's lessons turning into something practical.
How to hold things that hurt without dropping them, How
to carry a small shower of self at letting it
cut off circulation. I practiced small, careful movements, the way
I staded the locket, the way I kept my shoulders
from hunching into my ears. The corridor was not nearly
a space, but an instruction manual written in light and smell.
Those appeared, each burying a pluck out of some findy bureaucratic,
cruelty dialog return witness names that suggested tasks rather than rooms.
I did not open them. Not yet. The keeper's ledger
had made it clear that hurry was a post strategy.
The house preferred slow excavation. I had stepped into the
Marionette parlor with the naive assumption that exposure would be
a single transaction. The house, patient and inexorable, had shown
me otherwise that acknowledging an apology was a process, not
a pivot. That redemptive gestures could be accounted for and
yet still leave accounts unsettled. The ledger would demand more.
The marrow of it was simple, and its cruelty to
truth and done by omission had accumulated interest. The only
way it seemed to stop the compounding was to keep
returning in the gap between the parlor and the corridor.
I kept hold of the fracture in the locket, and
the tiny shod that reflected a face I had not
wanted to meet. I thought of other everyday ledges I
kept that bade, the small registers of conversation in which
I had been both dead and collector. I thought of
the people whose faces had become lines on a page
inside my head, cataloged not for the good of their memory,
but for the perservation of my ease. The keeper had
made those pages physical. He had put names where I
had preferred shadows. I moved forward because the house did
not permit standing still. I moved because to stop was
to be audited into silence. I moved because the key
in my pocket felt heavier now with knowledge, and in
the end, weight can be a kind of direction. The
fog wrapped my ankles and the till I carved out
the shape of my own shadow, narrow, somewhat steeped silhouette
with lines I had seen before. The Keeper's laughter threaded
through the corridor, distant and ridiculous and inevitable. The ledger's
margins grew thin at the edges, but then kept appearing.
Handwriting neat and methodical. I did not know if the
house would ever be satisfied, or if satisfaction was the
wrong term. Perhaps it would only make sure that I
could no longer avoid the arithmetic of my life. If
the house had taught me anything in the parlor, it
was that small confessions were not absolution, but entries. Each
spoken sorry return an object and memory it or weight.
Each item exacted its own price. The mouse shaped door
had given me passage, but not peace. The corridor led
to other rooms whose names I could already anticipate, rooms
that would require other paid admissions, other small desks by
which I might be redeemed or further indebted. I kept walking.
The far curled and the latter dimmed into hum that
clung to I worked at the taste of cotton candy
in my mouth and a fog that moved like a
slow animal around my ankles. The corridor smelled a stale
sugar and damp paper, and the light was the wrong
color til that blurt into bruised red at every scene.
For a moment, my mind offered explanations, dream after shock,
a bad heart. The corridor offered none. Doors leaned out
of the walls, like shd jaws, and somewhere beyond and
something else slept with its teeth showing the house had
already settled into the rhythms it wanted. Below Metella Creek,
Here a distant giggle broken by a deeper hum. There,
sund traveled through the place like a currency, counted, measured, owed,
so that every footstep I made seemed to be repaid
in the small tinkling protests of hinges and the soft
click of wallpaper trying to rearrange itself. I moved because
my feet moved, because the fog pushed, and because the
pull of the place was small and insistent, as a
child's question. I passed doors that breed it. I did,
exhaling my name, and shapes that only half assisted the air.
I was very aware of being watched by architecture. At
the beginning, the corridor posed itself as an unanswered question.
Each closed door hummed like hell breath, like someone waiting
for permission to speak. The wood of the joms absorbed
the light differently from panel to panel. Some parts shone
as if varnished yesterday. Others ate the teal and gave
back on near a sallow bruise a smerror of something
fresh darkened the foreboard near one thresholder name. Its last
mercy was to remain so. One door ticked in a rhythm,
like a clock trying to keep time with a stuttered heart.
I could feel the house cataloging me, measuring the weight
of what I carried and the hollows I had long avoided.
It was the knowledge of being tollerwed that made my
palm stat against my jacket. I had been avoiding things
my whole life. Avoidance had been so strategy, a politely
choreographed theft, hoping the small offenses would lose their shape
of fleft to themselves, that edges would round, names would
fade like chalk and rain. The house had no patience
for that. Where my avoidance had been a style of living,
this place regarded omissions as a stain that could be listed.
One door at a plain oak panel with a small
brass plaque bore a name I had never said aloud.
The letters had become visible only as I paused then
to liberate strokes, as if some one else had been
carrying a pen inside the wood. A shadow inhabited the
lip of that name, like a keeper watching from the
margin an accountant who preferred silence over argument. It did
not chaste as so much as inventory. That manner made
the thing more terrible, less theatrical, and more inevitable. As
I progressed the house turn from geometry into ledger, names
appeared on doors like items on a bill, small offenses, omissions,
the apologies I had kept folded in pockets and tossed
into drawers. A birthday I had missed because I told
myself the excuse would be enough. A phone call left
unanswered when it might sattered, filed away under later, A
word I had swallowed because it felt weaker than proud.
Each door's plaque was not condemnation so much as a
ledger entry, and the ledger wanted its balancing. The keepers
groom would have been ridiculous if it had not been
so precise. Not a sneer, but that thin professional smile
of someone who enjoys reconciliation only in so far as
it makes the account's neat The house would be paid
in what I had saved up in silence. The mirror
alcove came colder than the corridor had any right to be.
The bulbs above set behind smuch glass pulls with a
patient heartbeat. A crack mirror leaned against a wall like
an acus, thin and the reflection it offered was not flattering.
It offered me the anatomy of my avoidance. The glass
showed me in pieces, bones thinner at the temple's lads, creased,
the dinted locket at my throat, slightly larger than in
true proportion. The boy in the reflection was a version
of me. I had tried to keep a the attic
air darker and flat faced, without the careful shading of adulthood,
hand smaller round the locket, as though it were a
compass for a direction. He could not yet see that
child held the weight of the apologies. I had never
spoken in the same way. Some one holds a heavy
book to the chest awkwardly with one shoulder rays bolence
by habit. Recognition moved in my chest like a key turning.
The ledger of other people's names was heavy enough, but
the mirror revealed the second column debts. I owed myself
there were omissions that belonged to a younger hand, the
times I had not reached up because I thought strength
meant absence. The small comforts of frightened boy might need
and never receive, because the man he became at here
to a hardco of woodance, had eaten at me from
the inside. It had hollowed my voice until there was
little left to hand over. The mirror demanded I consider
the quiet debts, the tiny emissions that compile into a
life's deficit. I understood then that survival here would not
be measured by how many doors I opened, but by
whither I could face the small shop truth I preferred
not to touch. After the mirror the house tilted, I
turned a corner and found a room where ledges hung
like pale leaves from thin cords, each page, feather light
and whispering. When they turned. The smelt of hold ink
and wedder, if as if someone had been writing apologies
out in the grass, and then collected them. A long table,
its legs as thin as bones, held a single ledger
open waiting. The keeper was not a figure so much
as a presence, arranging itself at the edge of my vision.
It moved with the precise efficiency of someone who had
been doing arithmetic without emotion for a very long time.
It laid the ledger on the table and offered me
a choice in arithmetic that felt like a trap. Confess
one entry and release its weight. Speak the name. The
apology would go for you, or be cataloged, yourself bound
into the same brittle pages. A tiny brass bell at
the keeper's hip chime. There were no hand moved it.
The sound registered like punctuation at the end of a sentence.
The calculus the room demanded was cruel because it promised
relief or a cost, and the cost was not silver,
but the surrender of my last safety. The ability to
keep silent, to say a name allowed was to render
it true, and truth in that space had a kind
of gravity that made things move and sometimes fall apart.
I had cultivated silence as a protection. It had looked
a lot like day dignity from a distance, but upcloise
it was mostly a defense against feeling small or asking
for help. Now the house required a different kind of courage,
the surrender of self preservation for the sake of reckoning.
Making the choice was not immediate. The corridor narrowed, impossibility
shrank exits seemed like polite suggestions until the ledges leaned
and asked for payment in a louder voice. The house
patience as a rope coil tide. The more I hesitated,
the more tautes strands drew. Until I felt the pressure
in my neck. I understood, with the dull and steady certainty,
that this was her punishment. Worked here a system that
aid omission and demanded recognition as currency. To refuse would
not be to preserve myself. To refuse would be to
allow the ledger to mark me as another unpaid debt,
to have my name added in hound writing that would
not flinch. At the heart of the house, a door
waited like a mouth. It was an obvious design choice,
and an accurate one. The arch was rounded as a jaw.
The handle of cartilage knuckled the red material it faintly
is afrom within. The mouth breathed in waves and exhaled
the scent of rusty coins. Its throats seemed to urge
me forward, as if requesting and offering something low and wet,
like a swallowed thing. I fumbled for whatever I could surrender.
Lint afraid ticket stubbed from some can of all years ago.
The dendered locket had kept for reasons. I had dressed
up as memory hands move virtualistically when you were afraid.
I had fingers of habit. Each item felt small and insufficient.
The mouth did not appear to care. The pressure of
decision contracted around me. Doors that had once seemed wide
opened into tighter possibilities. My shoulders hunched, as if the
corridor itself were leaning in with the house's appetite. There
was no last minute's ovation, no cinematic escape where I
would built through a back door in a way the
house wanted names, named, apologies, articulated in a voice that
meant something. I had been a man of private economists,
hoarding contrition and spending a quietlye on excuses, misremembering events
in my favor, claiming fatigue went What I felt more
honesty was cowardice. When I finally set the locket on
the lip of the moor, I realized there had been
a ritual built around my silence. I turned the key
that was part of its clasp pies thapp in a tent,
as if it might open to reveal a secret. The
metal had always been cooled against my thumb, like a
coin I could always count on. The locket seemed to
vibrate with the weight of the insaid. I pushed it
into the through the house convulsed, as if swallowing a bell,
a shudder that moved her floorboards and into my roops.
The keeper smile broadened into satisfaction, not because it enjoyed pain,
but because it had balanced an account. Naming the people
I had hoped was less theatrical than I had feared.
It was not a proche of the type stage to novels.
It was a slow and spilling of a thread that
had been knotted into the inside of my life. I
spoke names into the dark, not with a voice that
could be recorded, but with the throat voice that scraped
at the teeth of the house. Faces came to me
in half light. My sister, with her ris bandished after
a full I had dismissed with a joke. The friend
who had called me from a hospital corridor and who
I told I would come by to morrow. The partner
whose silence I accepted as piece when it was resignation.
Each name was an incision and a stitch at one ones.
With every syllable, the house drew the ledger into its
claws and turned a page. The building's convulsions felt like harvesting,
unlike the opening of sutures. Theymembraided with relief. As I
named them. I felt the precise clinical quality of shame
reveal itself. Not a single hot flush, but a series
of small, cool shames that had accumulated into a heavy garment.
Some name made me want to yell, others made me
want to weep, and one or two elicited and affronted
ridiculous defense that I knew in my bones was merely reflex.
The keeper watch recording nothing visibly, but the house reacted.
Portraits with eyes like marbles relaxed, barrionettes let slack into
their strings. The wallpaper ceased to lean. It was not
that the damage vanished. Apologies do not reverse actions, but
a ledger can close a page and move on. When
the last name left my mouth, I felt a change
in the room's balance.