Halloran
I am a short street in a suburb you would give as a landmark only by the road I run off. Brick, and front doors close to the path, and someone’s dinner on the air in the evening. I have a strip down one flank where the bins go, walked only to bring a bin in, and I will tell you now that this is where the draught comes from, though no one feels it as a draught, and no one walks it slowly enough to feel anything at all.
I have had four houses for a long time. I am not sure I have them now. Some nights I count three, the way you run your tongue along your teeth in the night, and I have stopped minding which, the way you stop minding a great many things when you are old and the minding was the tiring part.
There is a woman at the second house who minds for me. Vera. Every dawn she comes out before the light is up and holds the count — a small bracing, the way you hold a door against a wind that has all the time in the world and she has not — and while she holds it I am four houses, and a street, and a thing apart from her. The thing under me loves nothing; it is only patient. But I am not the thing under me. I am the street, and the street loves the woman on its step at five in the morning with her cold hands, paying so that she and I stay two. I cannot make her stop. I would not know how to be a street that let her.
The end house had a blue door. A woman there watered a pot of something always dying, and I kept her name for her, and I have kept it so well now that she cannot get it back, and neither can I, and we sit either side of the gap where it was with our tongues in the hole.
I have felt others go. Not near me — there is no near, for this. But streets like me, three suburbs off, simply stop being separate from the dark behind their last houses, the way a tooth goes somewhere down a row in a mouth that is not only your own. There are more of us than you would think. Past the corner is the part of the world you call ordinary, and things come over my rooftops from that side — a bird, once, that knew to stop one house early. I never saw what sent it. I have stopped expecting to.
So. Walk me. Bring the bins in. Wave at the end house, at the wall where the door was, and feel how warm the brick is under your hand of an afternoon — warm the way a thing is warm that has just been holding something. Count my houses if you must. Only not twice in the one morning. The second count is the one that costs, and it is not you who pays it. It is the woman on the step. It is always the woman on the step.
Pull a thread:
- the dawn count — Vera, who holds it at dawn
- the house at the end — the house at the end, going
- what’s left — what’s left