the house that was a home
The house had been misplaced during the last Big Shake.
It didn't really belong here, just like me. And yet we somehow made it work.
I got a ladder, I fixed the roof. I took care of the cracks in the walls and the unsteady floorboards. I worked until my hands were rough and my knees all scraped up.
I cried and sweated and bled for this house.
I never expected anything, other than to be able to forget my own troubles.
But I shouldn't have forgotten.
The Big Shakes don't misplace objects, they only shake up things with a soul.
So when, half a year into my reparation work, a deep voice said, "thank you," I jumped more than I probably should have. I expected to be alone, after all, the house nestled in the crown of a tree, as ir was, in the deepest part of the woods, where humans usually didn't wander.
"Who's there?" I asked, with a shaking voice, like a bad actress in an even worse horror movie.
"It's me," the voice replied, "Jim. Who are you? You never told us your name."
"I'm Esther," I said, because what else was I supposed to do?
"Hello Esther!" another voice said, much less low and even than the first one. "I'm Clara! It's so nice to meet you!"
"Hello," I said, and finally dared to straighten up from my kneeling position, where I had just fixed some pipes under the kitchen sink. "It's nice to meet you too," I continued, because I wasn't about to be impolite. My heart pounded in my chest when I turned around, because the voices had been coming from behind me, but I wasn't sure who they'd belong to, what kind of creatures were hidden here.
At first, I didn't see anyone, and I was almost convinced I'd imagined the whole thing. Maybe some hallucinogenic gas leftovers in the pipes? And then my eyes focused on the empty space in front of me, and I saw that the space wasn't all that empty. Faint outlines appeared in front of me, silhouettes of two people.
The one with flowing brown hair and a long white dress waved at me. The seams of her dress and the bare skin of her feet were drenched in blood.
I closed my mouth and waved back. My fingers trembled. Clara beamed. Jim grinned.
"Are you haunting this house?" I asked.
"Yep!" Clara popped, and freckles danced on her nose.
"Oh," I said, and there was a sinking feeling in my stomach. Yet another place where I was intruding, then. Yet another home I'd have to move on from.
I tried to force a smile on my face, but it felt shaky. I felt shaky. I gripped the wrench tighter, and my knuckles turned white, but at least my hands stopped shaking.
Clara tilted her head to the side, watched me with sharp, intelligent eyes. Jim frowned a little.
"Oh," I said again, because for all I knew, they wouldn't let me leave. It scared me that my first reaction to that was relief, so I asked instead, "are you going to kill me then?"
They both reared back as though I'd slapped them.
"What?" Clara exclaimed. "Never!"
"Did you not just hear us thank you?" Jim asked, in a more reasonable tone, but his eyes were as wide as Clara's.
"I–" I said. "I thought I imagined that. And I don't know what you'd thank me for."
"Oh, so these six months of doing everything you can to fix this house were nothing to speak of?" They were sassing me, I realized. The ghosts living in this house in the tree were sassing me.
"I didn't do that for you," I retorted, before I thought about how it probably wasn't very wise to be sassing back the ghosts.
"But you still did it," Jim said gently.
"And it's not like you're gonna exorcise us now that you know, right?" Clara said confidently, and not all that gently, but now that she said it I realized it was the truth.
"No," I said, "and I don't regret I did it. Everyone deserves a home." I had to close my eyes, take a breath. "I'll leave as soon as the weather lets up."
The looks on their faces had me reconsidering. I wasn't a fan of stumbling through the woods in a thunderstorm, but if it'd let me get away with my life it would probably be worth it. "I'll get my things and leave now, then." I nodded to myself, and carefully placed the wrench on the kitchen counter, stretched my fingers to work against the cramp and didn't look up for another few moments.
"She's not getting it," Jim said. He wasn't talking to me.
"No kidding," Clara said, and she sounded way less happy than before.
I was just about to offer to jump out of the window if the way down the ladder took too long when warm fingers touched the hand I was still rubbing, and took over the task for me.
I looked up to see determination written plain on Clara's face, but she wasn't looking at me, focused on her task instead.
She was even more breathtakingly beautiful up close.
Something un-cramped in my hand, then, and I hissed through my teeth, breathed in sharply again at the smile on Clara's lips, couldn't breathe at all when her eyes met mine. She lifted her hand to cup my cheek, and instead of wondering whether she'd snap my neck I only noticed that her hand wasn't warm at all, and it wasn't cold; it had the same temperature as the room, and the ghosts were as alive as the house.
"Let me spell it out for you, Esther," Clara said, or maybe she whispered it. "You saved our lives. We'll be forever thankful for that. If you want to leave, we'll be sad but we'll let you go. If you want to stay, though, we'll make this the best home you've ever known."
She wasn't lying. Almost a hundred years later, and I think I'm going to join them soon. We don't know if you have to be brutally murdered in order to be allowed to stay, or if a peaceful death will be enough, but neither Jim nor Clara nor any of the other homeless souls we've found along the way would let me try the former. As the only living human in the house, I don't have much of a choice but to let them have their way.
And then, one day, I close my eyes. And when I open them again I know I'm truly home, because my skin has the temperature of the room and the shingles on the roof and the pipes under the kitchen sink feel like they're another part of me. And Clara cries and kisses me and Jim hold my hand, and then there's another Big Shake and I know we're ready for a new adventure, in this home that we've made our own.
