I have heard myself say that a house with a death in it can never again be bought or sold by the living.
It can only be borrowed from the ghosts that have stayed behind.
To go back and forth, letting out and gathering back in again.
Worrying over the floors in confused circles.
Tending to their deaths like patchy, withered gardens.
They have stayed to look back for a glimpse of the very last moments of their lives.
But the memories of their own deaths are faces on the wrong side of wet windows, smeared by rain.
Impossible to properly see.
There is nothing that chains them to the places where their bodies have fallen.
They are free to go, but still they confine themselves, held in place by their looking.
For those who have stayed, their prison is their never seeing.
And left all alone, this is how they rot.
I did not know it at the time, but the house that stands at the end of Teacup Road in the town of Braintree, Massachusetts, was such a house.
A house that holds a seat for the memory of a death.
The staying place of a rotted ghost.
At the time of my arrival in the first part of August, the house was occupied by Iris Blum, the author of 13 novels.
The kinds of thick and frightening books that people buy at airports and supermarkets.
Of her books, I have read fewer than nine pages of only a single one... and all the while suppressing a very bad taste.
I am not even sure of the title.
From where I am now, I can be sure of only a very few things.
The pretty thing you are looking at is me.
Of this I am sure.
My name is Lily Saylor. I am a hospice nurse.
Three days ago, I turned 28 years old.
I will never be 29 years old.
The phone just flew out of my hand.
The cord not as long as it seems?
Or I dropped it, like a stupid idiot.
I'm gonna give myself a heart attack.
Anyhoo... what's new with you? There.
It was just there, even then.
On my very first night in the house.
A death.
But I cannot see it.
Not yet.
But I can feel it shifting its weight from bare foot to bare foot.
Stepping around softly behind a curtain of dark.
Pacing back and forth in the cage of my chest.
Though it seems safe to assume that, as endings go, Polly's was not an especially pretty one.
But Polly wouldn't tell me herself, and I couldn't have gone and simply made something up.
So I have left it off altogether.
Out of respect for the dead, you understand.
Because yes, dear reader, Polly Parsons, the subject of this book, is quite dead indeed.
Quite dead but not quite buried.
Carelessly concealed in a grave too shallow to be rightly called a grave at all.
Better to call it a... hiding place.
It can only be borrowed from the ghosts that have stayed behind.
To go back and forth, letting out and gathering back in again.
Worrying over the floors in confused circles.
Tending to their deaths like patchy, withered gardens.
They have stayed to look back for a glimpse of the very last moments of their lives.
But the memories of their own deaths are faces on the wrong side of wet windows, smeared by rain.
Impossible to properly see.
There is nothing that chains them to the places where their bodies have fallen.
They are free to go, but still they confine themselves, held in place by their looking.
For those who have stayed, their prison is their never seeing.
And left all alone, this is how they rot.
I did not know it at the time, but the house that stands at the end of Teacup Road in the town of Braintree, Massachusetts, was such a house.
A house that holds a seat for the memory of a death.
The staying place of a rotted ghost.
At the time of my arrival in the first part of August, the house was occupied by Iris Blum, the author of 13 novels.
The kinds of thick and frightening books that people buy at airports and supermarkets.
Of her books, I have read fewer than nine pages of only a single one... and all the while suppressing a very bad taste.
I am not even sure of the title.
From where I am now, I can be sure of only a very few things.
The pretty thing you are looking at is me.
Of this I am sure.
My name is Lily Saylor. I am a hospice nurse.
Three days ago, I turned 28 years old.
I will never be 29 years old.
The phone just flew out of my hand.
The cord not as long as it seems?
Or I dropped it, like a stupid idiot.
I'm gonna give myself a heart attack.
Anyhoo... what's new with you? There.
It was just there, even then.
On my very first night in the house.
A death.
But I cannot see it.
Not yet.
But I can feel it shifting its weight from bare foot to bare foot.
Stepping around softly behind a curtain of dark.
Pacing back and forth in the cage of my chest.
Though it seems safe to assume that, as endings go, Polly's was not an especially pretty one.
But Polly wouldn't tell me herself, and I couldn't have gone and simply made something up.
So I have left it off altogether.
Out of respect for the dead, you understand.
Because yes, dear reader, Polly Parsons, the subject of this book, is quite dead indeed.
Quite dead but not quite buried.
Carelessly concealed in a grave too shallow to be rightly called a grave at all.
Better to call it a... hiding place.