Goodbye Said the House
By Charlie Kite
We moved on slowly, but the house moved fast. It sung as we drove away, with whistles and pips and sighs and creaks, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye my darlings. Roof tiles tumbled down onto the drive in an enthusiastic fit of waving. And as we rounded the bend, past the unnaturally staged flanks of beech trees, that ramshackle old place by the sea knew it would not likely see us again. It became joyous in its isolation. It was time to change.
The windows were the first to move on. The panes, rigid blocks of hand-holding fragments, separated, splintered into factions, even tiny isolated adventurers, snuggling into the green of the holly-choked verge. Next went the wallpaper, ever fickle, ever changeable. It crawled down the walls in sudden spurts to lie in new and exciting roundness, accumulating black dust tattoos like fresh burns over its faded florals. Nobody would have imagined that the pipes would follow so willingly, abandon the proverbial ship, but adventure was calling and nightly visitors with greedy hands found themselves awash with excited metal.
Our old house had become a palace. What was once six rooms became a thousand, ten thousand, as walls crumbled and splintered, as floorboards lifted up with sighs, as pockets of ground opened to reveal ancient wells. And with its palatial status came new residents. The termites, occupiers of ancient distinction, found themselves joined by woodlice (cheesy-bugs, we called them as children), who were in turn quickly followed by ants, by mice, by wasps. A cat settled in the kitchen to some controversy, as she initially expressed concerns; having pigeons in the attic might, she worried, prove too easy a dinner for her kittens. But she stayed, and birthed, and she and her brood minced around the lower levels, their shadows scattering the dust bunnies into gloomy corners. The attic trapdoor remained firmly closed.
And beneath the surface, foxes dug in. The house’s concrete foundations welcomed them, parted, made runways and hallways and nooks for them to scamper through. Underworld masters, they carved a kingdom in the dark and from there spread the tendrils of their midnight empire across the local surrounding. From Columb Cove all the way to St Winns, the foxes terrified chicken farmers and set new mothers rushing to their nurseries, thinking their babies screaming but finding them sound asleep. The house, the Foxes’ House, the Empty House, the House Alone, became known for its scent, for its sound, the way it spread a certain something over the village’s cotton-soft air, mysterious, unknowable. It was a centre, a fortress, a closed fist.
When I returned there, many years later, a kink in my knee and my hairline less than it was, the place had become a stranger. It had taken a new name, not known to me but dear to itself. And as I stood on that weeded driveway, staring up into the dark and cracked windows, the house looked at me and said, “You’re back? But... Why?”
Charlie is an off-centre cross-genre writer, focusing on nature in the modern world, magical realism and individuals and communities in change. As well as an accomplished playwright, with plays performed at the Edinburgh Fringe and VAULT Festival, he has had poetry published by 3 of Cups Press and recently won the Oxford Review of Books' Short Fiction Competition.
Instagram: @charliekitewrites