Respiration

A short story for the 'You Are Hear' Challenge, developed from my prose poem 'Drowning', created for the 'Negative Space' Challenge. https://vocal.media/poets/drowning-ded7be8365

Respiration

After Daisy Johnson’s The Hotel

You are drowning in wood and paper, a slow suffocation the house deliberately tightens around you. You plug its corners with cardboard and lace its skirtings with copper veins, desperately begging its structure to hold the noise you cannot generate. It lets its joists groan, mimicking the sound of breaking bone. You are terrified. It allows your unread novels to accumulate like layers of dead skin, a decaying army of paper soldiers stationed to keep its silence from bleeding through the walls. You call it curation, but you know you are only building a temporary dam against the quiet, and it is already beginning to swallow you whole.

The house is patient. Its hunger has outlasted all your distractions.

It offers you absolutely no place to hide. It stretches, flattening the air in the room into a loud, stifling trap that forces your gaze away from your belongings and into its waiting hollows. As your mind drifts, it pulls shadows long and deep against the cabinets, sending dark, parasitic fingers to wrap around your feet. It collapses the void, stripping away the objects you thought could shield you. For the first time, its walls do not just hide the world; they exhale a cold, predatory breath upon your neck.

Then, it dims the lights to a low, dying amber, before extinguishing them entirely.

It plunges you into a blackness so dense it feels heavy on your skin. In its total darkness, your illusion of space vanishes. You reach out, your fingers instantly scraping against the wallpaper where the walls have advanced, shifting inches closer the moment your eyes could no longer see them. You feel the final wave of your panic break against its plaster. You drop your keys, the metallic clatter muffled and digested by the floorboards. You lunge for the front door, your fingers clawing at the brass knob, but it has already swollen the frame; the wood has expanded, locking tight. You turn to the windows, but it has bled the shadows thick across the glass, turning the panes into black mirrors that reflect only your own hollow face.

You scream, but it catches the sound in its insulation, trapping the vibration before it can even touch the street outside. You realize, with a sickening drop in your stomach, that you didn't buy a home, you crawled inside a throat. It contracts its joists, drawing the ceiling down and t he floorboards up until the room fits you like a custom-built casket, sealing your screams behind layers of lath and mortar.

It begins the slow process of digestion. The metallic seams in the skirtings pulse, drawing the heat straight out of your body until your fingers go numb and your breath plumes white in the dark. Every desperate exhale you release is instantly sucked into its plaster, your vitality feeding the dry rot and strengthening its beams. You try to weep, but its predatory silence presses against your eyes and mouth, sealing your lips and compressing your ribs, until you are nothing more than another quiet layer of structural support, buried deep within its crushing hold.

Months later, the air inside it is still and dry, the quiet finally restored.

The only physical trace left of you is hidden beneath the floorboards, deep within the dark hollows of its frame. Your calcified fingers have fused entirely with the wiring, your knuckles bound by green corrosion to the veins of the house. Where your chest was pressed hard against the plaster, only a faint, greasy silhouette remains, a human shadow permanently trapped behind the paint. When the wind blows hard against it, its timber groans, vibrating through your integrated ribs.

It is no longer the empty, hungry vessel it once was; its wood and plaster have changed, nourished by your terror. The brittle creak of its old timbers has softened into a supple flexing. Its support beams have grown muscles. The air inside its hallways is no longer stagnant. It moves with a faint, warm respiration, exhaling a scent of old paper mixed with the sweet, metallic tang of fresh copper.

Its hunger hasn't been satisfied; it has been awakened.

The unread novels you left behind are no longer dead weight. It bleeds its dampness into their pages, molding them together until the text dissolves, absorbing your hoard into its own structural mass. Its walls have grown thicker, the plaster dense and soundproof, perfectly designed to ensure the next scream never reaches the street. Beneath the floorboards, your bones vibrate with a new purpose, acting as tuning forks that map the vibrations of the street outside whilst waiting for the heavy, unsuspecting footsteps of someone reading the For Sale sign on its lawn.