Entry #94
December 22, 2024 — 5:15 PM
I changed the loop I make at night. Front stairs instead of back. Kitchen light left on to throw a square across the dining room. I leaned a spare sheet of drywall against the east parlor opening, wedged a pry bar at the base so the panel stole the doorway. I told myself: one path, one lit lane, nothing behind me I hadn’t accounted for.
The house was already cold in the hall. The furnace clicked on and then mulled it. I could smell plaster dust and the sweet metal singe from the extension cord I’ve overused. The foyer bulb is old and turns the varnish on the banister the color of tea. I took the steps slow, the way you do when you’re listening to your own boot and don’t want to drown it out.
Third tread, the one with the long check in the grain, usually calls. Tonight it didn’t. The fifth did. Not the normal give, either—a dry shift, the edge whispering my weight as if it had been waiting there instead. I stopped and counted, because that has helped before. Three breaths, move. Two breaths, move. The sound kept its distance. Ahead of me, now, one tread up. I kept my hand on the banister. It was colder the higher I went, a seam of air crawling down my palm, opposite of how heat should go.
At the landing, I had already clicked the hall light on. I saw my shadow lift up the wall and then thicken in one corner as if a second edge had been thrown into it. Not a form. Just a dark-against-dark, moving when I did, stopping where the wall makes that shallow belly from the old plaster keys. The bulb hummed. The floor lay flat under me, but I could feel the slightest give to the runner as though someone ahead had just taken their weight off it.
I cut right instead of left, past the small built-in that I still haven’t sanded. The panel nails there pop in cold snaps; I listened. Nothing. Instead, the closet door at the far end breathed in its frame. A hair of movement, then the hollow of it touching and leaving the stop. I had set a chair under that knob before I came up. The angle of the chair back didn’t change. The noise had moved without the thing that usually makes it.
Downstairs, the sheet of drywall I’d propped made a faint tapping, as if a fingernail traced along the paper face from the far side and found the seam where I’d taped two boards under it as a brace. The pry bar held. The sound still drew a line exactly where a person would fit if the opening were clear. I told myself about drafts. I told myself about the furnace’s first push. I walked away from the mouth of it anyway.
In the upstairs hall, where the baseboard turns clumsy around the newel, someone had marked a carpenter’s line in old pencil. S.E.B. with the E blotted into a dark dot. I noticed it because the air there was suddenly colder, and because when I touched the smooth paint with my knuckle the bulb over me dimmed a fraction, as if my hand had come between it and the filament though I stood to the side.
I took my work into the front bedroom to avoid the blue room’s habit of catching sound. I kept the hall light on, the kitchen strip light on, the stair light on. The sander stayed in its box. I set a caulk gun on the sill and listened to the quiet settle around the soft tack of the bead I had run earlier. I had changed my path and shut what I could shut. In the window glass, with the room well lit behind me, the reflection did not keep to my shoulder when I shifted. It lagged, then met me, as if correcting its route the way I had corrected mine.
Moving differently did not mean moving alone.
— Thomas Hale