The Three Spots

House on the Corner I

On an insignificant street, in a town you have never heard of, right where the road turned a bend, an old house lived differently from all of its neighbours. Even though the heavy fog which covered the entire town that morning obscured any clear vision of it, the stark differences were startling to see in its light silhouette. In some sense, the silhouette made it look even more daunting than it would usually. It was crooked and twisted, as if it were leaning slightly on its one leg at the top. Its structure was archaic and designed for needs that had disappeared ages ago. If it were alive, it would have been a stubborn one.

But then, that's just silly. The house wasn't alive.

The most fascinating thing about the house other than its non aliveness, and my fellow city dwellers would have agreed if they ever noticed it or the street it stood on or the town it lived in, was that the crooked house didn't look flawed. It gave impressions where it stood like it was meant to bend abruptly in places where it should have been straighter, meant to look at you sideways and ignore the newer needs with which Nature had presented it to comply; like gravity.

Its wood scraped when you touched it, and made groans that it wouldn't otherwise, and its stairs were squeaky, even though it had just the one floor on its ground. Why the stairs were even there didn't make sense, leading upto the ceiling and stopping. And still there were a million other things to have been said about the house.

That remarkable house, nonetheless, was extremely silent in that morning. In fact, so was the entire street. In the harsh cold of the early dawn, no creature sneaked, snooped, or sniffed. The early birds refused to chase the worms and the worms made no noise. The crickets didn't sing any summer song but that's probably because it was not summer. Nature, for some personal grudge, made sure that no breathing soul appeared outside, and if one did, only to slightly assess the weather and look for signs of clouds and rain, it froze their breath and hung it in the air for the others to see.

So the street didn't utter a word because the words wouldn't flow through the air that refused to move. Until, of course, one cloud of mist appeared on the door of the house right next to the peculiar old house, in spite of everything. And most of the other houses on the street agreed that it would disappear just as well as it had come out. A new challenger was hardly worth to wager on. But it didn't leave immediately.

The frozen breath sat outside the doorsteps and didn't move. The breath faded a bit each time, and another blew out into the fog on cue. The condensation swirled in the otherwise still air, like they do in cartoons. And then it happened again. And all the houses watched in silence as they whispered their wagers, slowly and one by one.

For hours.

Or minutes, time is immensely harder to tell when nothing moves. And counting breaths only works when you are about to die.

Then all of a sudden, the remarkable old house on the corner screamed noises without any previous signs of warning. Having been silent all morning, maybe the house couldn't bear to not be the center of attention any more than a quarter of an hour.

But of course, that would only be true if it were alive. And that's silly.

On the street, and throughout the town, a series of rustling movements ran through. The breath gave a jump of surprise and then completely disappeared because the fog that covered the entire town ran away - clearing out right in the middle of the street before retreating to the forests behind. The sun came out for a peek to see if the world was cold anymore and was pleased to note it wasn't.

It was only loud.

The street was starting to move with the noise. The most evident element of it was the giant head of golden hair sitting on the steps of the house next door since dawn, which after a few moments of being frightened out of its wits, slowly advanced towards the source of the noise. And with a bit of snooping and sneaking and sniffing could see the room that the noise came from.