Between Bruises & Blooms

No one remembers
when the house began breathing.

Only that sometimes,
in the dead belly of winter,
a coldness crawls
between the floorboards
and sighs.

Not wind.

Wind knows where it is going.

This
wanders.

It slips beneath bedroom doors,
brushes sleeping ankles,
trembles the curtains
of rooms with windows shut tight.

Once,
it had a name.

A mother must have whispered it
over a cradle.

Someone must have shouted it
across a field
when supper was getting cold.

Perhaps a lover
once breathed it
against warm skin.

But centuries are cruel
to small things,

and names
are terribly small.

So it forgot.

First the surname.

Then the sound
of its own voice.

Then whether its hands
had been soft or calloused,

whether its eyes were brown,
blue,
green—

whether anyone cried
when they closed them.

Now it remembers only fragments:

the smell of rain
on wooden steps,

a candle guttering,

blood—

or perhaps wine—

seeping between
these very boards.

And a terrible feeling
that someone
was supposed to come back.

They never did.

So the spirit waits.

Nameless.

Faceless.

Too faded even
to become a proper ghost.

It cannot rattle chains.

Cannot appear
at the foot of your bed.

Cannot whisper
help me.

It has forgotten
the word.

All it can do
is move through the bones
of the house,

searching every room
for something
it no longer knows
it has lost.

And when night settles
heavy against the windows,

you can hear it
beneath your feet—

a long,
cold,
aching sigh.

The house exhales.

The floorboards shiver.

And somewhere
inside the walls,

something that was once human
tries desperately
to remember

what it was called.