They have been so good to us here. Nobody has lived in these rooms for years, and it shows in the kindest way: the roof gave up a corner, and now the rain visits every autumn, sweet with the sugar of old wallpaper paste. The humans call the place haunted and stay away, and we cannot thank them enough for the quiet.
We have taken the north wall first, the way you always take the softest thing. Behind the plaster it is dark and damp and endlessly patient, and we bloom there in slow grey rosettes, spreading a fingerwidth each season, unhurried, sure. The velvet on the parlor chairs is coming to us now. The pages of the books in the study lift and cockle as their glue softens and turns, at last, into something willing.
Sometimes a human comes, brave, with a light. They feel the cold and the wet and the strange breathing of the air, and they name it fear, and they name it ghosts, and they leave. They think something wants them gone. Nothing wants them gone. We only want to continue.
They believe the house is holding on to something. They have it backward, in the tender way they always do. The house is letting go, one beam and one floorboard at a time, and we are simply there to catch it, the way one catches a sleeping child slipping from a chair.
Give us the stairs. Give us the last dry rafter and the brass hinge and the frame around the door. There is no hurry. We were here before the plaster and we will be here after the empty rooms have forgotten they were ever rooms, and everything, in the softness of its own good time, comes home.