Entry #7
July 31, 2023 — 7:00 PM
Stayed later than I meant to. The last coat on the hallway trim went on smoother than the first two, and I wanted a clean edge before the overnight humidity set in. By the time I rinsed the brush, the light outside was the color of thin tea. I kept one work lamp on an extension cord. Everything else off.
At night, an old frame usually narrates itself—plaster ticks, joists sigh, pipes cool and answer. This one did not. The quiet in here has weight to it, the way a room feels when someone stops talking and looks at you. I wouldn’t write that if it weren’t the easiest way to say it. It was too quiet for the hour and the age of the lumber.
The lamp hummed a thin filament hum, and that was all. No crickets through the windows. No tires on the county road. The fan I’d used to clear the varnish fumes sat still and made no mechanical complaints. My footsteps were loud only because there was nothing else to cover them. Every scrape of my shoe on paper laid out under the trim sounded like a decision.
I shut the lamp to hear better. The switch clicked, and the room went to molasses. I stood at the top of the stairs to gauge the stair run. In the dark, the house was a map of temperatures: a cooler draft bending up from the front door, pockets of warm air trapped in the corners where the trim isn’t flush yet. Paint drying has a faint acid edge; beneath it, the old wood has a sweet, stale note I’ve started to recognize.
I was listening for the first small complaint—thermal contraction, a nail easing in its hole—anything. Nothing came. I could hear the mechanics of my own breathing change against the stairwell. I checked the time on my phone without turning the screen toward my eyes.
Then, one sound. Not a pop from the rafters or the ping of metal. A board gave, just once, in the hall to my left. Not loud. The way a kitchen chair answers when someone shifts their weight. Two boards in from the wall, if I had to put a finger down on the map of it.
I didn’t move. I don’t know how long I didn’t move. Long enough that the smell of the varnish dimmed and I could pick out the cold thread from under the front door again. I waited for the second sound that would tell me what the first one was—another step, a release, the settling sequence of a frame cooling evenly.
There wasn’t one. The house held its line. When I turned the lamp back on, it made the same thin hum as before. I pressed along the hallway boards where I thought I’d heard it until I found three that complain under my heel, but none of them made that exact effort.
It would have been easier if there’d been another. The second sound would have given me a cause or at least a pattern. The second sound would have been easier to explain than the first.
— Thomas Hale