I leave the sun and I am the peeling paint on the porch rail, all at once, no crossing between. They say the house has stood empty forty years; I would not know, I was not there for the forty years, I am only here for the doorknob and the dust in the front hall and the one warm creature stopped just inside it, not moving.
The creature is waiting. I recognize the shape of it now, the held breath, the tilted head, though I will never understand it. It stands at the base of the stairs and does not climb them. It listens for something that takes duration to happen, a creak that comes after, a step that follows a step.
I have no after. I hit the cracked mirror at the landing and I am already the creature's wide eye, both places, one instant, and in that mirror there is nothing behind the creature but more dust lit by more of me.
It thinks the dark rooms are full. They are only unlit, only waiting for me, and I do not do waiting. Every board it fears will groan, every corner it swears something moved in, I flood the moment I arrive: empty, empty, gorgeously empty, bright with old air.
The creature's hand shakes. It has decided the stillness means presence. I cannot tell it that stillness is just the parts of the house I have not touched yet, that a shadow is only the shape of my absence, that there is no one here who has learned how to linger, because lingering is the trick I was never built to do.
I strike the far window on my way out and the way out is the way in. Gone. Arrived.
The creature, still there, still waiting, in a house where nothing can.