House on the Hill

A truck’s wheels have wiped away some weeds’ chances, losing track of a mohawk curving up and around. Levelling out, dung splatters in cow clues the path of neatly hedged, invisible ixora and sweet lime. Waterlogged earth beneath them also buoys marsh palms, giving the banks a steppable appearance. From the limping galvanized gate, knotted closed by a discarded, holey hemline, the way forward remains unpaved. Returning to the house on the hill at sunrise, away from it at sunset.

At the house on the hill, this bird was not the type to imitate voices in echoing whispers and screams. From the surrounding wilds its songs were caged. Tuck-tuck-tucks and quacks are too common, but bantams know no better than to come running to lose their heads, because a hand sows temptation with a wave from the porch.

The walls of the house on the hill? They are of would, including: “Would you have stayed?”. It is the only house on the hill, not alongside another and another and many anothers forming a ‘Heights’ or ‘Terrace on the Hill’. Once a dream a man could not keep to himself, it now resembles an abode love vines will not share.

The house on the hill has no reflective surfaces. Its panes will not be replaced.

Small hours are soon supplanted, however. Through the creaky door, inside. The distressed purple heart floor is against you treading lightly, sagging under weighty suspicion. Mud will exhibit a footstep in the room, unmopped with diluted speech.

Outside, roosters vomit up their calls; inside, the click of a switch, then the crash of the splintering gleam, striking a terrain of edges and curves, including heart-shaped, crushed-velvet cushions that did not soften the blow of an ornament, once revered.

Blemished towels kneaded upon a ribbed board will not be hung, not even out of sight at the back.

Those paying the price of an unforeseen visit, who place their hats on the table to sit where the master of the house sat, and sip steeped moringa, and the ones who dare stay to fall back and slip under night’s skirt, will never use undiluted bleach behind and under what is too heavy to displace; never get on their palms and knees to face the surface cracks, nor scrub seen what is beneath stealthy decay; they will never patch the walls of would, brushing them over with a close-enough pigment so no one notices there were ever holes; they will never paint themselves in a corner of discarded issues.

Outside, it is four a.m., and so milk yanked from a Jersey cow’s teats strikes an empty bucket and then itself, bubbling through my imagination’s scarlet tint; inside, the noise of things unsaid by two thin people in a wedding photo; outside, wind raps windows and unwraps itself through whispering casuarinas.

“They say Crack Skull George still live at Hill House.”