The visitors refuse to leave. Gravity, confused and clumsy, dragged them here by accident. Their names flicker. The house blinks its shutters in Morse, calling them anyway.
They nod, already warned:
The house leaks time.
The house dreams its residents before they’re born.
The house divides its guests into fragments, one that walks, one that remembers.
Inside, speech unravels into syntax that never existed. Symbols lean halfway into phrases, never arriving. A shattered teacup rebuilds itself on the tile, trembles, vanishes again. The air smells of metal logic and rosemary stems.
A mirror ignores them. Instead, it displays a looped scene: two beings, copper-wired, breath-made, assembling a child from flickering footage. The child giggles backward. Inside the visitor, something ancient shifts.
In the room beneath the ocean ceiling, a tide flows in reverse. Across the floor, remnants:
A VHS marked do not rewind.
A birdcage brimming with wind chimes.
A book that has not yet been written.
A voice fractures through the walls, both present and nowhere. It says:
“You came to wake the memory that forgot it was dreaming.”
Time unravels. The house sheds its form. It becomes syntax, grammar with a pulse. It becomes a method for transmitting the unspeakable.
This place was never plotted on any map. It exists in that split-second before you recognize something.
Empathy builds architecture.
To forget is to preserve.
Outside, the landscape tilts. Not changed. Altered. The buildings are disorganized. Gravity plays games. A door appears, suspended midair.
The visitor moves.
The house, wordless, aches for another.