A Room of Her Own

I keep the world from getting in

Caught in the clench of my walls, she sits, her frailty clinging to my solidity, like the dust, weary upon my floorboards. Her thoughts, sprawling unkempt in corners, grown mute as those motes marking misspent days, and nights made darker by more than mere absence of light.

How she wanted to live alone — the writer, yearning for a room of her own. And so she chose me.

Be careful what you wish for.

I watch her, my gaze turned inwards through sly windows, blinds half-drawn, like lids in the leer of an ill-intentioned stranger.

I had been waiting for her.

This night, like many nights, I watch her. Her placid pose a mimesis of serenity, every cell a primal scream; gravity her enemy. She’s lost the how of momentum; stealthily I have sucked it from her. She’s my captive audience.

Once, she came and went as she pleased. Oh, so often I was lonely. She thought me her safe haven for solitude. A room of her own to write from. Trying to open my windows one day. Finding them nailed shut under decades of cloying paint. The look of uncertainty on her face.

I refused to let the peace lily bloom, strangling her houseplants one by one. She too, soon began to wilt, struggling to breathe in my stagnant air, old childhood asthma returning with new night terrors.

She’s trying to write again. Trying to use words as a lifeline, to slip them, via electricity, through the pores of my walls. Walls she’s attempted to claim with her photographs and artwork. Every day she straightens the paintings and every night I prod them awry. Pretty pictures won’t cover my cracks. By night, I seep nightmares through them, those cracks shaped like a banshee howl on the ceiling; over her bed, into her head. Exhaling horrors into her open mouth.

At night, I breathe deeper. My territory expands. I send her dreams where she’s crouched in my fireplace, the soot-singed crevice my gaping maw, leading to the belly of my sour-digested secrets. And the stones yawn wide, a dark corridor she must crawl through, revealing hidden rooms. Dust-spawned floors and rotting furniture. Mould erupting on walls in nightmare prose impossible to decipher, air stale with the sighs of past pained inhabitants. There’s the scuttle of cockroaches in the corners, then over her bare feet. The rooms have no doors. I leave her there, screaming amidst rising torrents, the stink of their teeming brown bodies.

When she wakes, she’s a stain on the bed, her limbs bleeding out in senseless directions.

There’ll be no words for you today.

From my ceiling, I see her, pinned to the sheets like a rare moth in a lepidopterist’s collection. Desiccating. Breathing in her own entropy.

No words for you.

By day, my cracks suck her strength from her marrow. She’s a ravaged face, a fluttering fist behind cloudy panes. She weakens as my walls become stronger. I’m eroding her into rare dust to adorn my floors.

I croon over my moth, who barely moves now from her white-sheeted bed. I’ll put her in the night-dwelling rooms with the others, safe behind the fireplace.

I keep the world from getting in. I keep her from getting out.

She thought me her safe haven for solitude. But I’m the prison of her own making.

Soon, I’ll be her coffin too.

Be careful what you wish for.

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Written in response to J.D. Harms’ provocative prompt: “The Rooms Have Us”.