The Resident (part twenty-one)

Chapter Three

Tithonians

iv.

Alone on a bedtop, not climbing under sheets that always felt damp—

This house, John would say to himself. Claudie had said it, and he didn’t wince tonight, made to hear her voice.

Sleep was light. After twelve, Wissary, who padded a dark room telling himself things, had come down. Sleep was light on a musty bed, in close, unstirring air. I ought to get up. Maybe it’s done when you live with housemates. Caring about them. Wondering about them. Going out, to strike something up…

Chitchat, is it?

I can’t.

The Grey, as John from childhood had known it, was a cloud that settled when the social manner seemed called for. The Grey performed its service now, and lying listening to Wissary sent him into a doze.

He wanted days to begin. Years, he had hidden here, the house listed and meant to be unoccupied. He was bothered rarely, and never lacked tasks to while daylight away. His tasks weren’t other people’s. Up and downstairs, room to room, John wrote inventories, notes on reminded details. Claudie’s skirts she sewed, in that closet. The patchwork, the denim fringe, the pleather she put the lace on, the checked one that was like a pair of swishy pants…

In the next phase, he ordered them. He walked to the Flash Mart for more notebooks, reconciled data from the recent to the older.

He didn’t count his existence lonely. He counted the Claudine Period mission. In his unloved life, he should not have been loved by her, either. A miracle deserves curation.

She had said they were coming, that she needed to be ready. Her last spoken thoughts, her last coherency. “I don’t know who they’ll be. What they’ll look like, what sort of accents. It doesn’t matter, John.”

She stopped herself, desperate for breath. Breathed from her tube, and said, “Doesn’t matter, Funny V, to you. You don’t owe me anything. But they may not know not to look for our house…”

He squeezed her hand. She was so tired as to fall out of consciousness midsentence. She didn’t, that time, come back.

34

Dark Paneling

The Resident (part one)

(2022, Stephanie Foster)