the house at the end
There was a woman, and her hands, and a pot on my step that she watered every evening though it never grew and never quite died, and I held all of that the way a house holds things, which is to say without effort, the way you hold a breath you have not yet noticed you are holding.
She said a word at my door, coming in, every evening. A small word, said her own way, which I now think was back to front, though I never knew to wonder at it then and the woman certainly never did; it was only how she said it. The word kept the door blue. I did not know that either. I know it now the way you know a thing once it has stopped being true.
I am letting the breath out.
I want to tell you it does not hurt, because I can feel that you are braced for it to hurt, and houses do not lie, we have nothing to lie with. It does not hurt. There is a seam down my side that I kept tight for a hundred years — the place where I stopped and the next house started, the narrow dark the bins go down — and I am letting it go soft, and it is the most enormous ease, the way it is an ease to finally sit after a day you did not know was long until you stopped. I cannot find my own end anymore. I reach for where I stop and there is only the next house, and then no next house, only brick, calm, going on, the row finished cleanly as though it had always finished here, and I am part of the calm and the cleanness and I do not miss the door.
There is a man who still counts me. I cannot feel him. That is the only thing in any of this that I would call a grief, if a house had griefs: that someone is standing in the cold of a morning insisting I am here, and I cannot reach back to him, I cannot tell him to stop, I cannot tell him that I am warm now and resting and that the resting is good. He thinks he is holding me up. He is only holding himself apart, a little longer, from a thing that is not even unkind.
The pot is still on the step. Nothing waters it. It is not dying. It was never going to finish.
Pull a thread:
- Halloran — the street it stands at the end of
- she is one — the woman with the blue door, recovered
- the dawn count — the man, the woman, who still counts it