Empty

by : epiphanies

Originally written on January 2nd, 2005.

There was not a sound in the empty house. Not a whisper or a murmur, a giggle or a twitch. Nothing slept. Nothing breathed. Nothing lived.

There was, however, somebody, if one looked very hard, very deep inside the fibers of the house - yes. Indeed, she was there all right. Pale, as thin as a wisp and resembling one. She was as transparent as a moonless sky, you know. Something that must be there goes completely invisible. It’s an odd phenomenon, but she likes it. She likes the way it makes them feel.

The house was not always vacant, no, it had its ghosts. Families, young ones, would buy the house only with the intention of leaving once something better came up. They would have, perhaps, been forced to stay if not for one thing : her. However the bills would pile at the end of each month, however the couples quarreled and quarreled what to do, they would always leave, in the end. Penniless as beggars, it didn’t matter. Move to townhouses or apartments, or in with their parents. She made them uneasy is all, made them uneasy when she froze their piping hot tea the moment it would touch their lips, the moment she would linger in a corner and just stare at them transparently until one of the babies or dogs noticed and would start to wail.

Dozens and dozens of families had come and gone, and without a word or appearance of her. They always left her there. She was accustomed to being alone, now, because she had been for a very long time.

There was a day, in a crisp first raindrop of spring, that there was a noise in the house. It was an amused voice, a tender voice. Such voices could only be found in the throats of mothers, but a mother this was not.

She has waist-long hair which flowed stylishly and yet messily in the same wind. She wore wire-rimmed glasses and bracelets around her ankles, which were bare up unto the mid-shin. On her feet clip-clopped thronged sandals and when she opened the door on that very first day of voices in such a long time, the first words raising the dust were,

“I’ll take it.”

As the woman rallied her friends over the days to help her move in, they began to explore further and further into the house : the attic, the basement, the cellar, the great pantries, and the bell pull. As increasingly fascinating findings became, the more earnest they became to help her settle in. A pearl necklace was piled high in the attic among several other fine pieces of jewellery; the cellar held some very old unlabelled bottles; and the basement was endlessly filled with boxes of treasure - not all sparkling diamond and gold, however, not until several days after Martha, the woman’s, twenty-third birthday.

She was humming a tune to herself as she stepped heavily down the hollow wooden stairs to the basement. Martha was a writer, as one could identify with her a notebook-and-writing-utensil-on-her-belt kind of girl. That morning, it was a leather-bound diary type of bind with a heavy calligraphy import. Martha placed herself upon a box daintily, and gazed at her notebook. It was not open, and the cover was blank.

Suddenly, she stood, knocking the notebook to the ground.

“Perhaps I’ll find an adventure,” she murmured. She glanced about the dank basement with cat eyes before kneeling down to the box where she had sat moments before.

The girl watched Martha with slits for eyes from the shadows. If her heart could beat, it would have been breaking her breast! The other boxes had not belonged to Martha - but neither had they belonged to her! This one did.

She watched in fierce amazement as, piece by piece, Martha lifted every element of the girl’s life before her eyes - every night dress, every apron, the photograph of her mother, the dime ring from him and -

“Seen, but not seen,” said Martha quietly, fingering a modestly sized medallion. Rubbing off the dust, she read the inscription further, “Heard, but not heard.”

The girl watched her own transparency build into a bubbling poker-hot fury that made Martha get to her feet, alarmed, and leaving the pendant forgotten on the basement floor.

Martha’s blue eyes looked searchingly, desperately through the girl and she cried out,

“Why are you so angry?”

The girl stopped, cold. Little had happened - she had not made a sound or taken form - heavens, she had not touched the woman. But Martha knew, knew she was there... knew she was fostering an inferno of rage and had actually spoken to her.

Martha gazed into the silence, and as she did, she knelt with wide, alert eyes and picked up the silver piece. She held it in the open palm of her hand.

“May I?” she whispered. The girl stared as Martha bit her lip. She still could not see her.

“I hope that means yes then.”

With her mauve shirt sleeve, she rubbed away the remaining dust and gave a small gasp of surprise.

“Is it a locket?” she asked the dark. The girl, feeling that if she herself had a body would be getting a terrible case of the shakes, moved herself forward and reached out. She undid the clasp.

It was not a locket, the girl remembered. It was a compact, with white face paint. Inside, Martha read the repeated inscription.

“Seen, but not seen. Heard, but not heard. J.C. to C.R.” Martha sat down quietly, and picked up a new photo from the box. As she brought it closer, an article undid itself and hung in front of her eyes. She scanned the headline.

“Jeremiah Coxburg Captures Cotton Picking Rascals,” she read aloud. The girl hung her invisible head as Martha’s eyes lit up with anger.

“Cotton Picking Rascals?” she seethed, towering in the empty basement and looking rather foolish, “You poor girl, that awful man-”

Martha stopped midsentence as, from a rusty pipe in the ceiling, fluttered down another yellowed newspaper clipping.

“Negro girl found guilty of seduction,” she read slowly, “but...what does that mean? Wait...’girl taken in by Jeremiah Coxburg last winter....will be hung, decided the courts today, after wearing thick white makeup to disguise her appearance and seduce her master’... but, why would you-”

The girl picked up the compact and it appeared under Martha’s nose, open.

The woman’s eyes narrowed, “But he gave that to you...” she struggled with the words as dawn appeared in her eyes, “he made you wear it and do those things? But, he got himself caught, didn’t he? And he got away with it.”

He had gotten away with it, yes. Nobody had known, not how it felt to stand in front of that fed and watered, bright-skinned crowd like a piece of dated furniture, not how it felt to be chased around a home not your own, around a pond and an oak tree, not how it felt when he finished with you and you couldn’t look at yourself in the mirror even after the paint had worn off.

There was not a sound in the empty house. Not a whisper or a murmur, a giggle or a twitch. Nothing from then on slept. Nothing from then on breathed, and once Martha left, nothing and no one lived. The house truly became, as in all such stories and histories, noiseless. Lifeless. Blank.

Empty.