When we found the house, we didn’t care about the crumbling walls, broken ceiling, and mixture of debris and trash scattered across the living room. We just needed somewhere to get away from fear of losing ourselves in the monotony that had chased us out of the bleak apartment buildings and dark alleyways of the city. Armed with nothing more than our sense of dread, we had run from in the middle of the night. I wasn’t even sure that I had locked the door.

Now we were in the big house on the hill that had seen more than the sound of water running through the old pipes could ever tell us, no matter how loudly it screamed. I was sure if I could learn the language in the creaking of the skeletal logs and the scurrying of mice in the attic, if I only slowed down to concentrate enough. But there was always so much to do and never enough time to do it.

Leon struggled with repairing the electricity while I tried to fix everything else, picking up the trash and sweeping the chunks of ceiling plaster off the luxurious green velvet couch that would never be the same but was almost better now that it was rough around the edges. Perfection scared me; wear and tear made things more approachable. We were each lost in our own world, and a silence came between us to stay. In the beginning, I liked it that way.

The gas stove in the kitchen didn’t work anymore, so I made our dinner in the firepit in the corner where the fridge should be, getting high every night off the smell of sulfur from the matches and burning wood. We ate out on the porch, looking out at the vast expanse of land around us, the rolling hills in the distance like some love story too sickly sweet to stand. 

We never thought to ask if we were happy there. The house was demanding, like a child, and at first I thought it would only take that first summer to get it back up on its feet. But as time passed, new holes appeared in the walls where they hadn’t been before, and the floor crumbled with every step I took.

Leon never seemed to finish with the electricity but slept like a baby every night while I lay there with my eyes glued open, listening. Were those steps that I was hearing, or only the echoes of memory? The house was foreign to me, but he seemed perfectly at home within those four ruined walls, and he wouldn’t share the secrets he had learned with me. The comfort between the silence between us was gone, and so much time had passed that it was unreasonable for me to expect him to break it. 

I’m ashamed to admit how long I tried to just keep going. Leon seemed to be blending into the house, adjusting his firm footsteps to an easygoing shuffle, his hands becoming knotted like the beams across the roof. I was left alone no matter how much I tried to tell myself I was part of his life there, but I stumbled and fell over loose floorboards and hit my head on hanging ropes.

Maybe Leon did learn to speak the language of the new home, but he never taught me to. Perhaps I should have stopped trying to fix things once I realized it only resulted in more damage, but that was against my nature. I couldn’t force myself to keep still and embrace the chaos, so I eventually just kept moving down the dirt road without ever looking back. I still had the apartment key in case I remembered to lock it after all.

Calla Smith lives and writes in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She enjoys continuing to discover all the forgotten corners of the city she has come to call home. She has published a collection of flash fiction “What Doesn’t Kill You”, and her work can also be found in several literary journals.