what did you find?

what new window panes they installed to stop the endless shuffle of dead things in and out. what new tables they built and arranged nicely to hold magazines and board games, use coasters please, vacuum underneath, between, behind. in the corner they found a spider the size of my hand and it scurried into a corner, through a crack, down into the in-between of the wall and the floor. we had to take apart the whole house, piece by piece. we stacked the wood in neat piles by size, and sorted the screws. the yard was full and pretty soon another house was built and then three more, the neighborhood was filling up, crowding, wall to wall, eave to eave. and who was she who moved in after, looking for a small room with no light, a small space to come and hide, a room in a house full of strangers?

she smelled like coriander all the time, and lemon, and she walked sort of sideways down the halls of the building, all connected by bridges and corridors to the other houses. she wandered the halls, running the pointer and middle finger of her left hand along the walls, feeling every inch of paint and door frame and trim and door. it was rough. dry and rough. mostly beige, mostly drywall, painted quickly and haphazardly, splatters left on the floor. the floor, ugly grey tiles. the ceiling, they didn't bother, it still stained from when that washing machine flooded on the third floor.

in that room the wallpaper peeled revealing thin wood panels which we took off to see what came next and discovered small compartments, little squares of shelves, little dark nooks home to dried flowers, green marbles, toothpicks, old tubes of paint, half used. all set gently in the center of their box looking out at us as we stood agape and wondering about the author of the book the library lost and set out fliers on the street for a reward, like if you lost your cat.

have you lost your cat?

have you gone looking?

what did you find?