Ways to say it
Footsteps go down the stairs. A door closes. After that, the silence is deeper than the drop from that clutter-shelf to the tiles that share a crack like a sealed mouth. Strange how such sounds can work together, contriving pocket finales: the castanetting of curtain-hoops, the far detonation of a stuck drawer nearly shut. Sometimes it seems that a house knows goodbye before any other word and slowly brims with all those ways to say it – letting them slip like something off a mantelpiece on a morning when the world is shod in felt. A postcard from a season that’s lost its light. A docket for some passing service, costed by a spider. A note, folded just the once, saying don’t ever try to find me.
