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Aaron Polson was born on the Ides of March: a good day for him, unlucky for Julius Caesar. He currently lives and writes in Lawrence, Kansas with his wife, two sons, and a tattooed rabbit. To pay the bills, Aaron attempts to teach high school students the difference between irony and coincidence. You can learn more about his work at aaronpolson.com.
Aaron Polson
The House Eaters
They began to eat the house on a Tuesday.
It was easy to remember the day because I would go to the bank and buy $30 in rolled pennies on Tuesdays. After returning home, I sat at the dining room table and sorted my pennies. Coins bearing the year 1963, my birth year, went into one pile, 1965 coins, as Maggie’s birth year, made a second pile, and the remainder I dumped into a large jar for re-rolling.
They came with a subtle sound like the snapping of a branch in the wind. They started in the attic. Maggie looked up from her jigsaw puzzle—she loved those puzzles—pointed her brown eyes toward the ceiling, and said, “They’ve come.”
After Mother and Father died, the house was excessive for only two of us, but it had been in the family for generations. Great Uncle Thaddeus practiced dentistry in our parlor; under the area rug one could find the holes where his chair had been bolted down. I dug worms for fishing from the backyard garden as a boy. Our mother was born in the bedroom we converted into a gallery for Maggie’s finished puzzles—the room tucked at the back of the house, just up the kitchen stairs. Our grandmother bled to death in that room after giving birth to Mother.
When I was younger, the parlor with its oversized windows had been my favorite. Father allowed us to open those blinds for a few hours each morning. I enjoyed the light and warmth. The rest of the house sat in such shadow and gloom, covered with heavy curtains, dark wallpaper, plush, velvet-lined chairs and sofas, and rich woodwork. With the blinds open, dust motes danced a garish jig just for us, swinging to the rhythm of breathing inside the house. As children, we didn’t understand the artistry of its deep grain, the gentle curves of the banister, or the intricate shell patterns around each window.
All we knew was that the house swallowed light. But it wasn’t the house, not really.
Outside, the sharp, close lines of the roof, gables, and cupola might deceive one into believing the house was much smaller than it was. Our parents had the siding replaced, covering the whole in a drab tan. As children, it was the only exterior we knew. Inside, the place was stuck in time; without, it faded into obscurity behind overgrown bushes and wild trees. Lost. Hidden.
Perhaps Father knew what slept in the house, and he preferred Them asleep.
In recent years, after Mother’s death, we had the place repainted. We paid a premium for a proper restoration: accurate Victorian colors and trim, new wrought iron from a specialty contractor from Ohio. Maggie was never satisfied. I understood her attention to detail, her care for the finest bits of minutiae, even if it was a passion I did not share. Most of her compulsion channeled into her love for those puzzles.
“The solution is in the details,” she would say.
She could sit all day, her fingers whispering over the pieces, quietly snapping them in place. I was content to arrange and rearrange my coins or read. Father’s library had been extensive and nothing of value had been written in years, so he often said. Maggie and I had a simple agreement: a brother and sister who drifted through middle age, perfectly content to pass our days with few words passed between us.
Neither cared much for the company of others.
I didn’t always feel that way, of course. When I was younger, in law school, I met Sarah. Once upon a time I even entertained the idea of asking her to marry me. Perhaps we would have shared the house. Perhaps she would have been here when They came. But that was too long ago, before Father died and Mother took ill. Before the trial and the questions and the first of Maggie’s stays in the hospital.
Poor Maggie. She always knew They would come, and no one listened.
We found a way to amuse ourselves despite Their presence. I worked at filling paper tubes with my coins to take back to the bank on the next Tuesday. Maggie had her silent aligning of small wooden pieces into their proper place. We purchased most of them through a special mail order catalog dealing in genuine wooden jigsaws.
There was always a certain joyful anticipation in the wait for a new package.
I was in the kitchen, preparing our evening tea when They ate the back stairs. Again, it’s the sound I remember most, the singular cracking of that finely-wrought woodwork. The noise startled me, and I dropped Maggie’s mug, her favorite green mug. A large section broke when it struck the tile, and the tea washed across the floor.
Maggie was always particular about her tea; she enjoyed chamomile before bed.
“They’ve eaten the back stairs,” I announced in the parlor.
Maggie looked up from her table and nodded.
She accompanied me back into the kitchen, and paused at the sight of her mug in pieces.
“My mug . . . what happened?”
With my hand on the stairwell door, I turned. “Sorry, dear. I was surprised.”
Her fingers worked the broken piece back into the crevice in the mug like a jigsaw bit. “It can be fixed, I expect. With a little glue and time.” She almost smiled.
After she spoke, I realized the noises were gone, They fell silent. I opened the door out of curiosity.
Nothing was there, of course. Nothing but the jagged, splintered ends of wood where They had taken their fill. The rest of the space was just gone. Not empty—not a gaping hole through which we could see the back garden, but gone. Emptiness has a color. The depths of space wait in black silence around indifferent stars. The back stairwell had nothing save for those frayed remnants of the house.
“We should move our things downstairs,” I said.
Maggie nodded.
Once we moved our things, changes of clothing and the remains of our collections, we settled into a comfortable pattern. Maggie’s finished puzzles were gone, of course; They had taken Mother’s old room on the same night as the back stairs. On the outside, the devoured rooms appeared intact—the outside of the house stood as it always had: neat gutters, finely matched trim, clean siding and windows. A passer on the street wouldn’t notice anything amiss.
But inside—nothing.
We slept in the parlor; Maggie took the couch while I reclined in one of the chairs. I woke most days with a stiff neck, but best safety lies in fear. Maggie talked in her sleep, muttering snatches of old nursery rhymes—stories Mother used to tell about Tommy Tittlemouse and Little Boy Blue.
I was awake, listening to her spin an old rhyme about what little girls were made of, when They came for the rest of the second floor. Maggie woke in mid verse, eyes startled and wide.
“Again?”
I rose and perched on the edge of the sofa, patting her salt and pepper curls. “Yes. Upstairs. I’m glad we decided to move our things.”
“Yes,” she said, looking at her hands. “I had hoped, maybe, that They—”
“Can’t be helped.”
She looked at me, her eyes dark and sleepy. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s not your fault.”
Perhaps it would have been easier if They did come to punish us, but no. They had always been there, in that space, hungry before a house was even a house.
After They took the second floor, Maggie and I were more careful. We spent most of our time in the parlor, dining room, and kitchen. The grocer made deliveries to our front door. I had no need to go out and held no desire to leave my sister alone.
At night, as I lay awake listening to the tattered remnants of wood creak and settle, I imagined losing Maggie. I imagined how she might be napping or asleep in a section of the house when They came… We were lucky thus far, or maybe a bit paranoid, and started spending our days in the same room. If I went for the tea, she would come with me. She sat with folded hands at the little kitchen table while I laid out cold cuts for dinner sandwiches or warmed a can of soup. She never prepared food herself, of course. Maggie never even opened the cabinets, not since Mother’s illness.
We passed a week cloistered to the three rooms. They were silent, glutted perhaps on their last feast, stuffed with the dust and memories from two stories of our home. Lulled into complacency, I made the mistake of stepping out of the house one evening at dusk. A little fresh air was all I needed, and the windows of the house were stuck with swollen wood and years of disuse. The air grew quite stale after a time.
I took a breath, and Their sounds came almost immediately, as if They were waiting, anxious for one of us to be alone.
“Maggie,” I cried, my voice lost behind the grinding of wood in Their jaws. The front door was useless, opening to the nothing where once sat our foyer. I hurried down the porch stairs to the side of the house where she would be sitting in the parlor.
She came to the window, her face white with wide, panicked eyes. After a moment of scramble in which she tried and failed to work the window, I waved her off. Seizing a fist-sized rock from the flowerbed, I hurled it toward the window. The glass pane broke, and shards dropped on either side like transparent pieces of a puzzle. I pushed the remaining glass from the frame with a coat sleeve, and helped my sister climb through the aperture to the ground. What was left of the room winked away behind her, swallowed like the rest of the house.
We staggered a few yards farther, even though They were finished, our ancestral home, devoured on the inside. The empty husk was all that remained.
Maggie slipped her hand in mine. “They’re finished, then.” Her voice wavered only slightly.
“Yes,” I said. I cast my eyes down the street toward the nearest light. “We should go.”
“Where will we go?”
“I don’t know.”
She squeezed my hand. “Did you save anything?”
“Nothing, Maggie. Nothing.” Everything was gone. My coins, the mounted puzzles, five generations of photos, the box of strychnine with which Mother poisoned Father, and Maggie slowly poisoned Mother . . . Gone. Consumed by the nothing in the house.
We had nothing left but to walk together, hand in hand, into the dark night and what lay beyond.
