Empty | Previous Challenge Entry

how it works

TITLE: Empty | Previous Challenge Entry
By JoAnne Potter
06/05/08
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So many years gone, and the house yet stands. I wait, but the front door will not yawn open. I watch, but the half-drawn shades of my old room do not wink. The house lives, but no longer breathes. I must push, because it does not draw me in.

Careful webs tie coat hooks together and reach across doorframes with vacant fingers. A spider, his work not yet finished, spins in the shadowed corner where Grandfather’s rocker bore him up long evenings. Motes stray through newer light, remnants of flour dust from Mother’s facile hands.

I do not know this place after all. Its hollow silence banishes every remembered encounter, both of weeping and celebration. It proclaims a vacuum emptier than death, its last exhale beyond record. No laughter echoes in these rooms any more.

The stillness falls hard. What happened to round days, full of sun and color? Where went scraped knees and stolen kisses? I know they still live and can almost touch them, like a whisker’s brush, populating the hallways of my constant memory. This brick and wood and glass witnessed, but did not hold a life any more than flesh holds a soul. I will not find my childhood here.

My footsteps stir the dust one last time. I walk out without thinking to close the door and do not look back.

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