WHERE THE SKY UNRAVELS

Home is the place where the walls have teeth, where the floors grow tongues that lap at your

heels, where the ceilings peel themselves open like eyelids to watch you dream. You step inside, and the

house swallows, gentle at first, like the slip of soup down a throat. Then all at once.

The first thing to go is your name. It slithers from your tongue, unraveling into the rafters like a

silk ribbon, caught in the maw of the attic. You don’t need it here. The house knows who you are—by the

smell of your sweat, by the rhythm of your breath, by the weight of your body pressing into its hungry

wooden ribs.

The walls shudder as you move through them, moving with memories not entirely your own.

Your mother’s hands, cracked with salt and soap, kneading fish bones into dumpling skin. Your

grandmother’s laughter, thick as pork fat, sizzling in the pan. A girl with your face but not your eyes

crouched in the corner, peeling long strips of wallpaper with her teeth, chewing the past into something

easier to swallow.

Home is a thing with a pulse.

In the kitchen, the stove flares like an open wound, belching steam thick as breath in winter. The

pot on the burner is older than you are, its belly blackened from years of hunger, from boiling bones until

they surrender their marrow. A hand—you don’t check whose—drops a fish head into the broth, its milky

eyes rolling upward, its lips still moving, whispering a name you almost remember.

You eat because you must. Because the house is watching. Because the soup is your birthright,

slick with ginger and garlic, bitter with the sting of forgotten things. You swallow, and the fish eyes settle

behind your own, looking outward, blinking in tandem with your own lashes.

The backyard is overgrown, lush with things that should not bloom. Melons ripened into open

mouths. Plum trees slick with something redder than juice. The grass shifts when you step on it, curling

around your ankles like fingers gripping, pleading. You pluck a peach and bite down. It bursts against

your teeth, hot and coppery. You spit out a molar.

Somewhere beyond the fence, past the tangles of thorned vines and rusted wire, the sea calls you

back. It is the voice of your mother, spitting fishbones onto her plate, telling you to never leave, to never

forget. It is the voice of the house itself, whispering that home is not where you are born, but where you

are devoured.

You go inside again, and the house inhales. The wallpaper breathes. The floorboards exhale. You

kneel, pressing your ear to the ground, listening for a heartbeat that is not your own. You hear it. Slow.

Steady. The sound of something waiting, patient, inevitable.

You could stay forever. You could let the house take you whole, peel you apart like a

pomegranate, press you into its walls until you are nothing but echoes in the woodgrain.

But you know you won’t.

You will leave with its teeth still in your skin, with its tongue still in your mouth. You will carry

its hunger with you, stitched beneath your ribs. And no matter how far you go, no matter how many doors

you lock behind you, you will always hear it breathing.

Waiting