House Keeping

After she left the house for realities unknown, the abandoned rooms hollowed out small discrete spaces for her to rest within should she ever return. Buses still stopped next door, sparrows hopped over the stalks of phantom roses, Eventually, Girl Guides selling cookies nixed her address off their clipboards. The mail began to forward itself to nowhere. The house tidied up the way den denizens do. sifting through mites and squamous dust for signs of her in-dwelling mind. It found non-intrinsic parts of her which it glued to the stale air as her likeness, yet this remembered facsimile kept dissolving in puddles of moonlight. The house began to whisper to passersby’s. It called to migrant cats, homeless mice, indigenous tribes of Carpenter bees. A face on a board was planted in the yard, prospective buyers entered and left, none moved in. The previous owner came back for a while, She occupied the new spaces pleased with the improvements. Then she left the house riding upon a starlit stairlift, her ghost moving upwards to a safer premise where grab bars and access ramps were reimagined in a newly renovated sky.