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Not a lot has happened since we moved to this old, broken house.

It was his idea to escape to the country.

“We’ll get a house on her last legs and fix her up,” he said. “Give her a new life and give us a fresh start. It will be good for us to get out of the rush of the city. We can fix everything that is broken. We can start clean”

When I first saw this creature we were to call home, I had to close my eyes to brace my staggering breath. The boarded windows were so grimy that they disappeared almost entirely against the unwashed walls. The foundations had buckled, making the whole structure bend inward as if it could fold into itself at any moment, and vines hung off the balconies like cobwebs, weighing everything down, pulling it in. The lawn was thick with weeds, the path up to the porch was wrought with potholes, overturned, sharp stones, and litter, and a foul stench was baked into the earth. Nothing would go near this place, and nothing that did could leave. We had to cut our way to the fallen door. My fingers were twitching as we approached, my legs desperate to run. Yet we felt pulled into it, like it's hull was magnetic.

At first we spent the full of our time like he said we would, fixing it all up. We spread fresh paint on molding, saggy walls, laid polished floor boards over splintered gaping cracks. Let doors float on newly oiled hinges, the windows hang loosely in their walls, finally free of dust, newspapers and plywood. And we painted the door red.

“Red is a warm color.” He said, “Red will welcome those we love and mystify those we have yet to meet. New life,” he said, “starts with a red door.”

We sat in silence through the first days after the repairs were done. Ladders hunched in the corners of our kitchen, canvas tarps licking the sides of our hallways. Tools, sheets, nails, paint buckets, corpses strewn through our living room. We waited for something new to consume us, sitting at the table, drinking tea which tasted like plaster.

He started sleeping downstairs. He said the summer air made his body feel strangled in the heat. I asked to go with him but he said it was best I stayed in the master bedroom.

“If we let this house become a stranger, it will never be our home,” he said “best to get used to sleeping in our bed.” So I stayed.

We had started again, just like he promised. We had bought the decaying body of another life, cut out the gunk, the rot, the carnage, contorted the shape with broken bones, covered it all in a new

layer of skin. Twisted limbs of trees, hunks or rock, mineral dust, we built our house of the dead. There is nothing living here.

Then we cleansed our lives of the tools we used to gut the house. As if they were evidence of our gruesome crimes. We swept the kitchen, scrubbed the floors, threw out the tarps, smoothed a cloth over our kitchen table, sat down to eat. The tea tasted like dust, and we pretended not to notice.

We sat in silence once more.

He keeps the door open some nights. He says he doesn’t but I know what it feels like to have fresh breeze creeping through the hallways, swaying through the rooms.

He says my accusations are crazy, that the doors open silently so all the noise I’m hearing is just in my head. And I know the hinges don’t squeak but I can still hear the door slipping free of its frame, the hush of the knob turn and click. Sometimes I think I can even hear him talking, but no one ever responds.

We live the summer afternoons in slow motion. The heat of the summer rolls over the front porch, the rocking chair creaks on the deck. We sit in lounge chairs and sip ice tea through the thick air. Sometimes I try to fan my sweat cold so that for once,I can close my eyes with ease, because I no longer trust the night for sleep. He always just sits in the silence and the still, staring at the trees at the edge of the yard. I feel as if we are already in our final rest. Nothing has ever seemed so permanent.

I know we are working our way through the peak of summer but the nights seem to grow ever longer. They creep up on us, daylights just a whisper lingering in the echos of the almost constant darkness. Soon the night will be all that’s left.

We’ve had no visitors. Even the stars themselves seem to avoid this threshold, and yet I swear the halls grow louder and longer each night.

I cannot sleep through the racket of it all, voices pounding and scraping along the walls. All the beating, banging, screeching. When I think I can bear no more sometimes I throw off the covers, pace down the stairs, tip toe to his bedside. He always seems to be fast asleep though—I know —I’ve heard him screaming. Caught him staring emotionless at the blank walls with his eyes wide open and his teeth clenched. Seeing curses in the lifeless plaster.

The house is aging. All the work we did, falling apart in the looms of long shadows and behind swinging doors. He says he cannot see it. That it is all just as beautiful as it was when we first stopped working. But I can see the floors wither, sink and crawl away from my feet. The windows blur and shrink as a walk past. The paint drip down the walls.

I dream the house is breathing. I wandered through the rooms, watching the walls cave in and push out.

And I know that maybe it is me who is losing my sanity and not this house that is losing reality. But I don‘t know what else I can do when the fences rise like skyscrapers and the path to the outside stretches two miles. I am trapped in this world, whatever its origin. I know he said this was an escape but this house — it feels like a burial.

I can’t unlock the doors anymore. My room is a straight jacket. The halls a twisting maze of corridors. I run through them, tearing my feet on the floorboards, breaking my hands on the walls. I always end back where I started. My door is the only one I can find anymore.

Something is following me around every turn. It paces outside my room, its long claws scratching at the door, its' black tongue slipping in and out of the gaps in the threshold. Soon it will get in.

We have no family, nor friends, nor visitors. Just a door we painted red, and whatever followed us through it.

This how we will spend the end of our days — living with ghosts.