Entry #34
January 29, 2024 — 8:30 AM
Cold set in hard last night. The radiator coughed once around two and then went quiet, leaving the room to tick and cool by degrees. Primer smell is still in the grain of the door even with the window cracked a finger. The mattress is on the floor because the bed frame is half-sanded in the hall. Dust makes a taste like old paper. The floorboards answer your weight even when you’re still; they flex with the house’s own small decisions.
Right at that slack place before sleep, where your breath goes automatic and the room fades into shapes, I heard something too close. Not across the room. Not in the walls. By my ear. A drawn-in sound that timed wrong with my own breathing, as if someone testing the shape of a syllable without committing to it. It brushed the cup of my ear and cooled it, the way a draft finds the wet rim of a glass. I’m not going to write what it almost sounded like.
I sat up. The blanket slid and made that dry felt noise over the sheet. The window showed a thin vertical of sodium light. I waited and counted to thirty, then sixty, holding my breath to hear past it. The house answered with what it always has: a soft pop in the plaster where the corner settles, a click far off in the baseboard where a nail lifts and seats, the faint ping of ducting shrinking. The door eased in the frame and stopped. Nothing near, nothing spoken. My breath fogged and cleared the cold pane in a rhythm I could see.
I can account for most of it if I try. There’s a gap along the east sash where the wind threads a narrow whistle. If I lie with my ear turned, my own breathing can rebound off the wall and come back out of step. Fatigue misfiles sounds. The ear invents company; I know that. There’s a metallic edge to this room right now from the fresh screws in new studs, and the winter air can play them like cheap chimes. Any of those could make a mouth out of the dark if you want one.
It wasn’t the distance that bothers me. It was the nearness. Skin-close. Not a house noise in the abstract, not the long wood of the beam moving over time. It felt chosen, as if the room skipped everything it could do loudly and came in at the quietest setting. That’s an impression, not a claim. I’m writing it down because impressions accrete faster than facts and I don’t want to forget what they looked like before they harden.
When I lay back down, I turned to face the wall and kept my palm cupped over my ear like that would fix the physics of it. The mattress had kept a warm shape where I’d been. The rest of the room kept cooling. After a while the radiator woke and rattled like cutlery in a drawer and I fell asleep against the noise I know.
I won’t give last night a word it hasn’t earned. But I’ll say this: being unsure is worse than being certain.
— Thomas Hale