Poetry | Stories | Photography
You strip the house of everything that reminds you of your love.
No fixtures and fittings remain, the paint’s stripped away, and what was once a home is now a shell of a house.
Instead of choosing to hold your dead soulmate’s memory close, you destroy everything, including yourself.
An old feeling,
scented potpourri bags buried in drawer corners.
Fragrant papered lilac and lemon linen cupboards,
a new feeling.
The house breathes the many
scents of the old and the new.
Weeping from behind the brown door grew louder and louder until one could hear the crying from all corners of the house.
The house lives and breathes something primal; malice lingers in the corners, threatening those who venture too close to the flame.
She is only six, so she knows things and sees things the adults choose not to see, things adults choose to forget.
Weeping from behind the brown door stirs something forgotten in her soul as if she knows who occupies those walls.
Taking a torch, she pads tentatively along the hall of rooms to the one sitting at the end, the one with the brown door.
Experienced with keys and as sharp as a knife, she hastily acquires the key and puts the right one in the lock to see if it works.
A click and movement are all the convincing she needs to enter without fear, only to discover why the weeping continues.
Two eyes stare at her, and a quick movement frightens her, yet she holds her nerve and enters further into the room.
The eyes occupy a person. The person is familiar to her; the person is her long-lost sister, who she feared dead.
Convinced at once that this is her chance, she takes her sister’s hand, and they pad along the hall and out into the night.
Their parents wake up to two empty rooms and two sisters gone away by a vanishment that created a legend.
For the girls, they made their way through the forest and into the night; now, they live countries away without fear of the night.
C & K 