Entry #10
August 20, 2023 — 10:15 PM
End of the second week. I was upstairs on the landing, working the hinge side of the front bedroom door. The jamb is out by a hair and the house still argues with my square. I had the clamp light on the banister sending a bright cone down the hall. Everything else went gray with the sun dropping behind the trees. The air smelled like hot dust and cut pine. Cicadas outside, fan humming below, one slow drip in the gutted bath.
I’d skimmed paint off the casing earlier and found two shallow letters in the wood, old and shaky—an S crowding an E. Could be anything. Kids with a nail. A bored tenant. I puttied around them and kept going.
Near seven, I stepped back to sight the reveal and something moved at the edge of my right eye—quick, low, like someone slipping past the hall mouth toward the stairs. Not a shape, more the shift you catch when a person passes a doorway and you don’t look up in time. I turned and there was only the dark run of steps and my own light striking the bottom newel. Dust hung in the beam. The drop cloth lay where I left it. Nothing else changed.
I stood still and listened. The fan downstairs ticked. Drywall grit skittered under my boot when I adjusted my weight. The curtain in the front room was breathing in and out from the open window, making the faintest brushing sound against the sill. The clamp light hummed. No other sound moved. No second step, no hand on the rail, just the house holding itself and the outside singing.
I took the bulb guard off the clamp light and looked for a moth. None there then, though one came later. I nudged the lamp so the cone swung across the landing and watched what the shadows did. The branch outside threw a broken pattern that crept along the plaster as the wind shifted. The mirror I’d leaned against the hall wall to keep it out of the way caught the light and gave me a copy of the stairwell that was darker than the real one. If anything slipped in it would look like that—just a pressure in the corner, more change than thing.
Eyes do this at the end of long days. Peripheral vision is built for warning, and mine has had its share lately of nails, blades, and steps without railings. My hands were gritty. I hadn’t eaten since noon. The light was wrong—hard lamp in front of me, dusk behind, and the stair throat always looks like it pulls light in. Easy enough to make a mistake between glare and shadow and a restless tree.
I finished hanging the last hinge and packed up slower than usual. I didn’t dwell on it, but the pacing of that shift stuck with me. Not the sway of a branch, not the strobe of a bug at a bulb. Just that small suggestion of someone not wanting my attention and getting it anyway, for the half-second before I looked.
I’m going to start breaking down earlier. Less work at dusk in this house.
— Thomas Hale