![]() ![]() Inside, every door frame is notched: the respective growths of former tenants, friends. It is not a house where someone was punished, or a house where someone might be punished, but a house that replaces punishment instead of feeling guilt or regret you must play quietly in any corner, and eventually the emotion will resolve itself. Everyone calls it, the house, the House of Punishment-more than one mistaken citizen has turned up looking for a similarly-named erotic dungeon on the other side of town-but the name is misleading. The house is haunted, but no one knows anything about the ghost or how it messes with you, except for the fact that every time she goes away (to Texas, to Memphis, to Graceland, to Germany) she always ends up coming home again. It should go without saying, but it should be said anyway. (It’s her birthday, she’s at the movies, the screen is a tidal wave, someone touches her leg, she wakes up with her fingers tangled in the strings and the kettle whistling.) ![]() Her hands strum but her mind is still dreaming. Sometimes she finds herself playing guitar before she has left sleep. In the morning the light creeps sideways through the windows and lights her up from the chest down, her head nestled in the shadow. Her dog is buried in the garden along the eastern wall sometimes, she wonders if the ground will bloom half-a-dozen of him under a certain kind of moon. The house is exactly what you’d expect: practically a studio apartment except it stands on its own, draped in honeysuckle and Dutchman’s pipe a yard of dune sedge and stone. ![]()
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