When a child sees a dark, brimmed figure on the stairs and a woman who hums at the edge of their bed, the house learns the sound of their breath. Years later, the voices haven’t stopped—only learned new ways to sound like home. A return to one locked room forces a choice: believe the memories were harmless dreams, or admit the humming never needed a voice to begin with. The truth waits behind a thin door—and it’s been practicing your name.
#nightfallcrypt #horrorstories #paranormal #psychologicalhorror #scarystories
#nightfallcrypt #horrorstories #paranormal #psychologicalhorror #scarystories
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CreativityTranscript
00:00I remember the hat first. Not his face, not his height, not the shape of his hands or the color
00:08of his coat. Just the hat sprang out of the stairwell's shadow like a dark lid lifted off
00:16of night. He stood halfway down, balanced on a shallow step that my mother always warned would
00:23take your ankle if you weren't careful. He didn't move. The light from the kitchen, soft, yellow,
00:31patient, because the bulb was old, reached up and touched the underside of his brim.
00:38The rest stayed unlit. He tilted the fedora the way grown men do when they say hello to strangers
00:46they don't owe anything to. It was either a greeting or a farewell. The gesture conveyed
00:53both, and the ambiguity felt like a matter of manners. Then he was gone. Not turned, not
01:00climbed, not dropped. Simply, the step no longer had to hold him. I kept waiting for the rest
01:08of him to occur. Footfalls, floorboards, the peculiar complaint of our banister when a palm
01:15skimmed it. Nothing followed. The kitchen clock went on with its clop-clip metronome.
01:22The dog in my brother's room sighed as if he'd just resentfully accepted the terms of another
01:28dream. My mother's voice kept on low in another room, muffled by the particular snow of a phone
01:36speaker that doesn't trust you. I made myself oatmeal and stirred it until the spoon's alarm
01:43sounded. The kind of slight sound that feels like it means more than a bowl, but it meant only oatmeal.
01:52I ate. The day occurred. That's how it went at five. Events entered, nodded, and left. The oddness
02:04only grew teeth in memory. After the man with the hat came the woman. She did not arrive so much as
02:12accumulate. At six, the door crack mattered. I would stare at that wedge of darkness and brightness.
02:20The hall's dull carpet. The low glow from the bathroom nightlight. The modest slant of ceiling
02:28like a shoulder seen through a shirt. And I would count the breaths between my eyes closing and the
02:35doors. Doors, spaces filling with quiet. The humming began the same week I learned to tie my shoes
02:42without sitting down. It sounded the way hands feel when they help you without making it your fault.
02:49A low vowel. An old melody whose bones were kind. The sound came from the foot of my bed.
02:56The mattress did not indent. The blankets did not pull. But that's where the sound lived. At the invisible
03:05hinge where my feet ended and the night began. Sometimes she whispered. Not words I knew then.
03:14And not words I grew to know later. It was comprehensible the way wind is. In that you can hear the
03:21direction, the temperature, and the size of what it pushes past. Meaning moved through it like stones
03:30under a stream. I named her Marina because I needed a name that evoked water and night. I never learned
03:38hers. She never corrected me. There were rules. Children invent them without knowing they are laws.
03:47I learned that if I flinched or turned too fast, she would stop humming. If I asked out loud if anyone
03:55was there, the room would forget how to be warm. If I called for my mother, the hallway would recoil
04:03and unspool the distance until our house felt like a place with wings. So I kept the rules. I lay on my
04:12side, the cold spot in the sheets against my calf like a coin under skin, and I listened to Marina sing.
04:21On nights when the furnace exhaled and the ducks clanked, the sound of her voice would thread through it.
04:29When rain ticked off the roof edge and made that slow conversational dripping onto the back steps,
04:37she would fit the drip into her rhythm. Sometimes she sang until the house itself began to imitate her.
04:45The walls a little hollow, the window a little careful. Every week she grew closer. Not enough to
04:53notice on a Tuesday. But Friday would arrive and the sound would be nearer to my knees. A month would pass
05:02and the song would be under my hands. By winter, I could feel the cold minted shape of breath that
05:10wasn't mine, reconditioning the air between my face and the dark. I do not remember the words. There were
05:19none to remember. She hummed a mouth-closed tune, the kind you sing to keep yourself company while you
05:27fold someone else's clothes. But the phrases bent in a way that felt like language. Sometimes I awoke
05:35certain that she had said my name, as only family can say it, threaded through with old tiredness and
05:43private relief. Only to realize the sound had been the radiator fussing. The dog eventually refused
05:51to enter my room. He would sit at the threshold and set his paws exactly on the line where the carpet
05:58changed to wood, and he would pant and turn his head. Looking at nothing, if I coaxed, he would wag at me
06:07and wag at the ceiling equally. He was not unafraid. He was practicing not believing in fear.
06:16Around my twelfth birthday, my brother moved out. We did not say it was so that I could have his larger
06:23room, away from the bathroom vent that sighed, away from the stair that kept a secret in its third from
06:31bottom plank. We said it because kids outgrow beds. But we moved my things into his room in one afternoon.
06:40My mother bearing trays of pencils like a nurse in a movie. Me setting the lamp at the far corner,
06:47where light would have the longest to fall. The first night in that room, I slept without Marina.
06:54I tell you this with both hands open. I didn't know I would miss her until the room was mine.
07:03For weeks, I slept. The kind of sleep that doesn't remember being asked to come, that doesn't require
07:10proof. The house seemed to accept the swap, as if the air had wanted me elsewhere, and now it could
07:17return to its normal state. But you can't move the topography of a person without leaving the river
07:25where it was. Sometimes I dreamed of my old room in a way that felt less like dreaming and more like
07:33being asked a question. I would stand in the doorway, my mother's office now, even as a future,
07:42and watch the chair with its wheels turned the way a chair turns, when a human just left and momentum
07:50needs dignity before it stops. The lamp would be on. A stack of papers would lean like a person who
07:57hasn't decided whether to sit or leave. And on the bed, the covers would be smoothed into something
08:04that implied a visitor had been very polite. If I woke at three in the morning,
08:11sometimes the humming would be in the hall. Not nearer, just practicing.
08:19My mother transformed my old room with the efficiency of a person whose hands had been
08:24waiting for a project. Walls repainted into a neutral colour, none of us would later be able to name.
08:34The closet had been converted into a craft supply arrangement so precise that opening it felt like
08:40a crime. A desk with drawers that oiled themselves. The bed remained because every
08:48office needs a surface where you can fall asleep while reading a book late at night.
08:54I tried not to go in. When asked, I would fetch paper clips and leave with a gratitude that sounded too
09:02loud. If I had to print something at the old printer my father once loved and we never replaced,
09:10I would stand at the threshold and let the machine draw the paper in with its old mouth mechanics
09:16and spit it back without letting my toes cross. When you practice avoiding a thing,
09:22you ritualise it. It grows ways of being sacred. Years happen the way rain happens, sustained,
09:31with unremarkable ambition. We moved to a new neighbourhood and then moved back.
09:36The dog died and the next dog felt like a cousin trying to be a brother. School involved lockers,
09:44then applications, and then a thought about leaving that didn't stick. I learned how to sleep with a
09:51fan on. Not because I was hot, but because I needed to hear the air making its decision.
09:57The voices arrived as small decisions too. Not voices in the theatrical sense. No interlopers.
10:08No dramatic pronouncements. No funhouse acoustics. Just the sense that the house knew my name
10:16and liked to say it the way you test a microphone. Soft. Twice. Satisfied when it doesn't feed back.
10:24I saw things too, but not the sort of things that lead strangers to clap your shoulder and give you news
10:32stories. A shape just outside a window that turned out to be the window shape. A coat that forgot to
10:42remember what a coat is in the middle of the night. The way the bathroom mirror carried clouds like a
10:50person breathing. Even when no shower had steamed it. I held down a good job and then another. I met
10:59someone and had the necessary conversation about commitments that sound less like vows and more
11:06like errands that never seem to end. I bought a plant and apologised to it. And it lived anyway. But every
11:16Christmas, when we brought the bins down and my mother needed labels, I would volunteer for the new
11:22office and then find a reason not to. The door learned how to sit closed in a way that made it appear open.
11:32You want a moment, don't you? The part where the lights go out, the song swells, and the thing steps
11:39across the hallway using the bannister the way a home uses your hands. I've wanted that moment too.
11:47I've tried to name it. To bank it like a check. But the ugly, unfilmable truth is that most hauntings
11:56worth a life come on slow. The thing you live with becomes the thing you are. And by the time you notice
12:04the difference between the two, you require a specialist. Here is my specialist. A key. I found
12:12it in a drawer full of batteries whose energies were all wrong. It was a minor key, not fancy. The
12:19kind that is surprised to exist. It belonged to the lock on the office door. That lock had never been used.
12:27Our family was the sort that trusted the door to be a suggestion.
12:31I put the key in my pocket. It was heavier than it was. It stayed a week there, strange and particular,
12:41until an evening pressed against the windows and asked for something to be done.
12:47My mother had gone to bed early. The dog, the new one, not that new anymore, had chosen the couch
12:54and decided to sleep in the way good dogs are. Morally. Rain had come in raw stripes all afternoon
13:04and by evening the gutters were telling jokes about it. I turned off the television because its talk
13:11had started to sound like people who were almost ready to stop lying. The office door stood at the end
13:19of the hallway. The way you stand at the end of a thought. I went down the hall and stood in front of
13:26it. The house inhaled. I could feel the walls gathering their breath through what they remembered
13:33of their lungs. The key turned like it had waited a decade to be asked. The lock gave me a dull recent
13:42click. The sound of decisions that installed themselves. I opened the door. The light inside
13:50was a stitch. One line of the ceiling's fluorescent simmer. The sort that never turns all the way on
13:57because it enjoys suggesting it could. Paper smell. Ink smell. The clean sadness of office supplies.
14:06The bed was made. Of course it was. My mother kept it as if guests might at any minute arrive who required
14:16a history. I stepped in and the air took that step with me as if it could not stand to be far.
14:24I closed the door and the click of it sounded intimate. On my tongue the air tasted old,
14:31a little metallic, like the aftertaste of a penny pressed to skin. I stood a while because it is
14:39important to admit when a room is older than you are. Then I sat on the edge of the bed where a person
14:46would sit if they meant to stay but also didn't want to argue about leaving. My weight changed the
14:54bed's comprehension. Spring spoke under the mattress in a whisper of custom. I put my hands on my knees.
15:03My knees said we aren't children anymore. My hands said please. And then the humming began. I did not
15:12feel the mattress shift and still I knew that someone had adjusted their weight to accommodate mine.
15:19The tune came up from the bed, the way heat sometimes does, where a body was just now. The melody was exact,
15:28the same low familiar line that had been with me at six when the door crack admitted the hall.
15:35I did not hear words, but my mind filled in syllables the way your mouth fills in when a dentist colonizes it.
15:43I recognized the pattern that had once soothed me and now irritated me, like a well-meant advice repeated
15:52into adulthood. Sleep, sleep, sleep, good child, stay. I tell you, I did not move. I listened. I recognized
16:05something else. Timing. The phrasing matched my breath. I inhaled. The hum lifted. I exhaled. The hum curved
16:16down. In. Up. Out. Down. A duet of air. A thought surfaced, ugly from the bottom. The kind that's covered
16:28in silt and old coins. I've been humming this whole time. Number. That is not precisely the thought.
16:38The thought was, something learned to make my breath sound like it's singing.
16:43My throat ached in a quiet, secret way. As if all winter I had been telling someone it wasn't cold.
16:51I pressed two fingers under my jaw and felt the racing there. Not panic yet, but the interval before
17:00panic, where music is selecting its instruments. Marina, I said. The name came out with the obedience
17:10of a childhood dog, too late to retrain. The hum stopped as a courtesy. The room turned its head.
17:18This is the only way I can say it. As if to hear me better. The fluorescent light blinked slowly,
17:26with a decrepit flicker that suggested a supernatural explanation. When in reality,
17:33it was due to old circuits and the passage of time. The stillness that followed the light was not
17:40electrical. Something had decided on silence.
17:44I heard my mother turn over in her room down the hall. I heard rain forget itself as sleet. A brief
17:53performance. I listened to the dog sigh again. Because dogs sigh against the fact of being alive
18:01and not allowed to have the couch in the way they want. I can't stay, I told the room. Though the room
18:08had not asked. I'm not sleeping here. It was not sleep I feared. It was the gradualism of it. The way
18:17sleep makes roommates with whatever is already in the room. How it allows the hum to carry without
18:24asking why a breath knows notes. The door knob, my side of it, twitched, as if reconsidered by a hand.
18:34The lock clicked to attention. Not the keys click. The other one. The one doors make when they will
18:41obey the following order, whatever it is. The bed warmed under me, slightly. Or I warmed it. A compromise
18:50between two bodies that might agree to be one if you dim the lights. I stood too fast, and the room
18:57moved a hair late, like a boat. I crossed to the closet. Opened it. The supply smell backed away like a
19:06bird from a window. Inside the precise boxes with their neat labels watched me, polite. In the far
19:14corner, behind the plastic curtain of a garment bag, the shadows made a hat shape. I know. It was the
19:22curve of a hanger. The drape of old wool. I know. But in the time it took me to understand the facts,
19:30the rest of him occurred. Not a face. Not a man. Never a man. A posture that knows you and a gesture
19:39that meant it had known you all along. The hat tipped in that open, indefensible way that makes
19:47you want to return a courtesy. Then the garment bag only held a garment again. This is a suggestion.
19:55You can call this the brain's ready-made kit for seeing what it has already paid for. But memory
20:03is an economy that rarely forgives debt. I closed the closet. Not hard. Not as a statement. Simply to
20:13keep my inventory from spilling. Marina, I said again. And the room's corners sharpened like an ear
20:22cup to a wall. The humming returned, softer now, like a person humming to themselves while doing
20:31something with their hands that matters more than the tune. My throat arranged itself to listen.
20:38Without thinking, I matched its pitch with a vowel behind my teeth. Not an answer. A test.
20:46The two sounds met the way two people who once loved one another meet on a sidewalk and pretend to be
20:55the weather. The mattress shifted a fraction. There, there finally. The old honesty of an indentation.
21:04Just enough sag to tell the truth that bodies do. That gravity has witnesses everywhere.
21:11I stared at the dip and wanted to put my hand into it. The way you put your hand into a pond. To see
21:19whether what looks like surface is surface. I did not. Memory organizes itself in lines. I remembered the
21:31nights she had moved closer, incrementally. I remembered how the dog refused to go into the room.
21:38I remembered the way my breath had been taught to be music, and realized all at once that I had not
21:45asked whether the song had intended me to sleep or to be silent. Why me? I asked. I didn't expect an
21:55answer. The hum lifted, held, and then made a sound that was either agreement or something like a smile.
22:03The mirror over the dresser, the one my mother used to check if a blouse belonged to this hour
22:11or to all the hours before, had a habit of catching the door at a kind angle.
22:17In the glass I saw the door behind me. In the glass I noticed that it was open wider than I had left it.
22:25In the glass I saw a shape in the crack, something very black, where the hallway had more flavors of
22:34darkness. The brim of a hat takes light differently from other edges. It steals a slice and leaves the rest.
22:43I turned. There was no hat, no man, no trick. The door stood open, fully, the hall uninterested in drama.
22:53It occurred to me, an unoriginal but useful thought, that if the humming matched my breath, then any
23:02silence belonged to me too. I held my breath hard. The room learned it immediately and stopped singing.
23:10In that thick, non-sound, I heard a whisper that had always been there. A thinner thread running under the
23:19tune, like the slight sound of a page being rubbed between fingers. Come back. It did not say my name.
23:30It didn't have to. I stepped backward toward the door, my feet making the careful, indifferent shoosh of
23:37socks on carpet. The room's air pressed itself forward, as if to keep me. The way a theatre's air
23:46sometimes leans into you when the show has made a mistake. I reached the door, and the knob was
23:52suddenly warmer than it should be. I do not mean it was hot. It felt like a palm had just let it go.
24:01I pulled the door shut. The lock, obedient to the last command, slid into place. I turned the key,
24:10because the key wanted proof. The house exhaled, relieved like a patient who has decided to try
24:18sleeping sitting up. I walked the hallway, a corridor I know by heart, because I've been every
24:26age in it. My mother's door was closed. Her breath made the soft ocean against the machine of her health.
24:34The dog had not moved. A little hoard of warmth under his collar. I sat on the floor by the stairs,
24:43where the third from bottom plank begins to tell stories if you step on it wrong.
24:48I waited to feel like a fool. The feeling came on time. I waited to feel safe. That feeling arrived late
24:57and left early. The humming continued on the far side of the office door, muffled. The tune pressed
25:05itself through wood and argued with the grain. If you hold your ear to a door, you are admitting that
25:12you are a door too. I did not listen with my ear. I recall a place within me where the shape of my
25:20childhood bed is still stored, in case someone asks for a diagram. It is tempting to say I slept there
25:28at the top of the stairs and dreamed nothing. Temptation has a better memory than I do.
25:35I must have slept because I woke to grey, and grey only arrives with the permission of time.
25:42The house was new again, or more accurately, pretending to be. My mother's door stood open and the sound of
25:51coffee had begun the day's arithmetic. The office door was closed as if it had always been. As if
25:59keys were parlour tricks and locks were only stories the unbrave tell. I made toast. The butter remembered
26:08me. That is what butter does. It forgives your hands for being colder than they were as a child.
26:16I took a plate down the hall, because a person alone often eats standing up, just enough to miss the
26:24chairs. The office door unlocked, open under my hand without complaint. The air in the room did not
26:32have the night's logic. It smelled of paper and something sweet that was not anything in the room.
26:40The bed was smooth, the dip I had not touched until it was upon itself. On the pillow, exactly where a
26:49head would have been if a head had been there, lay a single strand of hair. Black. It is not a confession
26:57to say I pressed that hair in my palm as if I might end it between my lines. It did not break in the
27:05middle. It folded itself like a thread in a seamstress's mouth. I held it to the light. It did what hair does.
27:14It remembered light and then forgot it. I took it to the kitchen and set it on the table beside the
27:22butter plate. Because that is where forensic evidence rests in houses where nothing ever happens
27:29officially. I did not show my mother. Some beauties are better when they do not have to account for
27:36themselves. The day did what days do. The humming that night did not return. Or it did and I slept
27:47through it. If an opera is performed for sleeping ears, does the soprano forgive you? I do not know.
27:55I have never asked a soprano to ease me. I have asked for mercy, but they only seem to want a bargain.
28:04Weeks held. The office remained a room and not a mouth. I practiced walking past it plain.
28:11I went into it twice to fetch paper and did not apologize to the bed. Once the dog put his paw across
28:19the threshold and did not retract it like a person withdrawing a statement. I thought about bringing
28:27the hair to a scientist or a priest or a friend with loud opinions. But I didn't do any of those things
28:36because the hair had done what it was meant to. It had been seen. I tell you this as kindly as I can.
28:45The thing did not end. There is no end. Not even the kind we pass and call a chapter. It is only that
28:54hauntedness is an ecosystem and mind learned to eat less. But if you are the sort who requires a scene,
29:02the needle where the thread ties off, the house gave me one without being asked.
29:10It was summer, right in the middle of it, the part where the air has your bones in escrow and says it
29:17will return them when the storm arrives. The power went out in that cute way power does when it is bored
29:24with itself. The house shrugged with a quiet, roomy pause and then began its candle version.
29:34My mother had a drawer full of good matches because she liked the sulphur of a second.
29:39I lit what we had and set one on the dresser in the office because it is good to share heat with
29:46rooms that have shared their cold with you. Without electricity, the office's fluorescent bar had nothing
29:54to pretend to. The candle's flame bent the shadow of the lamp into a shape I remembered as the body of
30:02someone who sits and listens. The bed received the light and made it look like a hinge. I stepped in.
30:11The room brightened because I am a light too. We often forget about ourselves because of the loudness
30:17of electricity. I set the candle near the bed and its breath made mine waver. Marina, I said,
30:28meaning the room, meaning the hum, meaning the years we had loaned each other without interest.
30:35I won't come back here to sleep. The candle spoke in its language, wick to wax, flame to air.
30:44The hum did not arrive. An inn is not arriving. I heard it everywhere. An absence that thick
30:51is only a presence that doesn't want to be seen. Why me? I asked, because the question had not retired.
31:00Why am I to be sung to? Why am I to be taught breath? Why was I invited to learn the shape of doors?
31:08At the edge of hearing, behind me, from the hall, or from the stairs, or the vent,
31:16or the dumb mouth of the house where the third from bottom board lifts if you tempted,
31:22I heard a stranger's child cough. Not a dramatic cough, not illness. A child's practical clearing of
31:30air, the kind that says I've been singing under my breath for too long,
31:34and now I need the note to pass. I move to the doorway, because that is what you do when a child
31:42makes a sound in your house that is not a child you own. The hall was candlelit, dark, with flavors of
31:50black, corners performing one another. From my mother's room, nothing. From the living room,
31:58it is clear that the dog is sleeping. From the stairwell, the memory of a hat that may or may
32:05not have ever been. Hello, I said, and the house made the shape of listening. There is a part of you
32:14that is a stair landing, a part of you that is the room at the bottom, and a part of you that is the
32:22hand that decides whether to take the railings. I stood for all three parts. The cough came again,
32:30a child's, closer to my chest than to the hall, somehow. The candle behind me, in the office,
32:38fluttered, not because of wind, but because rooms have nervous systems. I may be wrong about what
32:46happened next. I can offer only what I have. I felt my mouth open and a sound escaped, not from my throat,
32:53but from my lungs directly, as if a hand pressed there. A hum. Low. Warm. The melody had been waiting.
33:03It came out of me with the insistence of a creature that had learned its route, and would no longer ask
33:10for permission to commute. I did not decide to sing. The song was chosen to be sung, and I was the closest
33:19instrument. Down the hall, no, right in front of me, if you ask certain angles. Something shifted the air
33:27the way a small body shifts sheets to make room for its knees. I could not see anyone. I hummed.
33:35My breath paced itself to the old lullaby it had been taught. The house listened the way old churches
33:43listen. And I do not know how long I stood there singing a song I supposedly never knew. Long enough
33:53for the candle to gutter and steady. Long enough for my knees to interpret my body's weight as opinion.
34:01Long enough for me to understand that I had not been sung to so much as I had been tuned.
34:09I may have always been Marina. Or that Marina is only the name for what a room becomes,
34:16when it sits very still and learns the range of a child's fear. When the power returned, it did so with a
34:25hint of self-congratulation. The refrigerator reintroducing itself to the soundscape,
34:31much like a man re-entering a party with excuses. The fan in my room resumed its decision-making.
34:40The lights returned, rendering the office ordinary, which is to say, ruinous in a different way.
34:47I blew out the candle. Smoke proved itself, and then faded into invisibility. I left the office door
34:57ajar, not cracked like a child's fear, but ajar like a person's refusal to promise, and went to bed
35:05in the good room where I had always slept best. That night, the humming resumed from the office,
35:13or from the hall, or from the stairs with a bad board, or from the place just under my ribs that
35:19thinks it is a window. It was not constant. It did not grow closer. It did not flee. It existed the way
35:29a river continues, whether you drink from it or not. I slept. If a dream came, it left no evidence
35:39except for the certainty I woke with that my breath had learned a second language and preferred it.
35:47In the morning, my mother asked if I had been in her office because she could smell matches.
35:54I said yes. She nodded the way mothers do, when all the versions of an answer are acceptable.
36:01She told me she might move the desk to the other wall to see if the light felt kinder in the afternoon.
36:10Do you ever hear humming in there? I asked, as casually as someone asking for salt. The fridge sometimes.
36:20She buttered toast, satisfied with the world's physics. Or the vents. Old houses breathe.
36:31They do, I said. And then, because language is a key, and we must decide where to turn it, I added.
36:40We should leave the door open. Everything. She agreed. We left the door open.
36:48The room did not object. Or it did in its silent way, which is to ask for a better listener.
36:57Every so often, passing that open door, I hear my name, not in syllables, in that bent phrasing that
37:05implies more than it says. When I listen to it, I stop and let my breath slow until it finds the old melody.
37:14If I keep very still, I can feel the house tip its hat politely and let me pass.
37:22I know you want to know about the hair. I kept it in a small envelope under a book about the coastlines
37:30of places I have never been. Isn't that what we do with proofs? We press them into travel we won't take.
37:39Sometimes I imagine it is mine, snagged from some sweater, and that all I've done here is
37:45autograph my own haunting. Sometimes I imagine it is the houses grown like ivy from a crack in the wall.
37:54Most nights I do not imagine at all. I have learned the ecology of not knowing. If there is a child in
38:03this house now, it is not one my mother or I bore. But sometimes, especially on storm nights when the
38:12gutters crack jokes too loudly, I hear small footsteps enter the hall at an hour I would have loved to be
38:20brave at. The steps pause at the office door. The air leans. Somewhere, a song rehearses the shape of an
38:30old breath. I stay in my room. I leave the door open, not cracked. I let the house count for itself.
38:40When I can't help it, when the question insists the way some questions do, with manners, I stand in the
38:47hall and hum once, very softly. A note I recognize because it used me as practice. From the dark,
38:56something very close learns it quickly and answers me with the same note, matched ideally, lifted and
39:03held. It is a small voice, or a vent, or a door seam, or the place at the edge of the bed where the
39:12weight of a body intends to one day belong. I am not going back to sleep in that room. I am not,
39:20but I keep humming. I don't know how to stop. I'm not sure if I want to. On the best nights, when the
39:28song and my breath become indistinguishable, and even the dog lifts his head to listen, I see,
39:37only in the edge of a mirror, or the back of glass, or the rhythm of a curtain. The tilt of a hat,
39:45like a goodbye, that lasts too long to be just hello. It is either an exit or an invitation. It is both.
39:54The truth. It always was.
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