Crystal-clear orbs before a scalled finish, a daily intruder that can and often does slice through our roof, raining crimson shards onto pearl walls, I, the house, watch, sometimes in strength, sometimes in agony.

That roof bursts so often - yes, sometimes from the blotched sun rimming our horizon, but more often from within the house’s own heart. Droplets leak out from beneath a rocking chair or under bedsheets, and it isn’t long before the house is flooded, pushing me higher and higher until my neck is cricked against the domed glass of the ceiling. I, and the house, have to hold our breath then - out of anticipation, sure, but also out of fear that the escaping bubbles from my mouth might be the final push that shatters this poor worn facade yet again.

These are grim times, but I almost prefer them to the times when the water doesn’t flow at all and the sky folds in half like a sunset gone wrong, the pinkness, far darker and more forbearing, creeping like fog until only a sliver at the edge is left to let in the light. This drought, this eclipse, a shivering without cold, a cough without air, a frozen stiffness without a spine, I, and the house, can see near nothing in the wan light of the crescent sky. The inside feels sickly, like old fear-sweat and moldy food, and even though I’m still here watching I feel the word abandonment curling about my feet and gnawing at my foundations. The walls are painted lavender but it’s seeping like a bruise.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

And too long this eclipse lays heavy over I, the house, and also the house, we have no Atlas to hold off this weight.

And when the shadows swim thick in the house and I, when wind crawls through my sunken nostrils, when I’m huddled like a child on the cold rock floor, I feel the weight like a hundred oceans piled on top of me, and I await the house’s collapse.

I am not the house, and so I wait, and wait, and huddle and shiver and wait.

Outside the house it sometimes rains upward, drops of water rising up from parched ground and slipping like little worms through the tiny slit of light that remains.

When the relief comes at last I feel nothing, but I watch, and I know the time has come, for now, to an end. The slit widens and narrows again, directly at the zenith, there’s a snick, and out flies the looming disk that has so threateningly glowered over the house and I. The light is blurred but any light now is a balm. Rhythmic spools of breath rumble below my feet, and I am the house again, if only tentatively. I the house can see that it was the house that moved the intruder, during the time when I was not the house.

Tomorrow I will be confused, tomorrow I will be frustrated, tomorrow I will return the intruder to the horizon over the house, but now the sky closes and I take my rest.