The Child

And through the windows of the house, there could be seen a child.

No one knew the name of this child, and fewer knew the face. Perhaps if any had been able to know this child, the house would be bright and the world less dreary. But it was not to be, and the child lived there, alone. 

Forever was a word that the child knew, that the house knew, too. It might have been the word to describe that state of being that they found themselves in. The house and the child, the child and the house. A cracked window and a forgotten leak in the roof. 

The house knew its body to be dying, knew the child to still be living. It could feel the wind seeping into its body, feel the child’s steps wear away the floor and the walls and the world of them. 

The child did not know this, maybe. Maybe no one knew the house to be a body. Maybe everyone knew it, and no one cared. 

The knowledge changed nothing. The wind blew. The water froze. The child ran and the world cycled around the two of them, without care. 

On the street below, a car passed, or maybe a hundred. The child didn’t know. The house might have. But it was them and the child, the child and them. 

A season passed, and another. Another, maybe.

The child did not grow. The house didn’t either, but it did change. The house fell in on itself day by day, and there were few words for it. Rot may have been one. Eternity may have been another.

From the walls of the aching building, there fell pictures and panels and eventually the wall itself, and the child delighted in the decay of the place. They hid in the crevices of the leaky roof, wore the moth-bitten curtains as capes and clothes and played make believe under the collapsing metal beds, rust and rot the way they had always known the world to be.

Every piece of the house that the child took was a rending of its being. Who knew the pain it felt. Not you, not I, not the child.

It would have happened anyway, maybe. Or maybe not. 

But it had happened, and the roof fell in, and the world with it.