House With No Windows

By Tegan Anders

The Girl is alone in her House without windows, and it swallows her whole. She is alone in her House without windows, and this room is too bright. The next room is too dark. The Girl and the House live here together, within one another. She haunts this House, and this House haunts her back. She used to be friends with the mice in the walls, but they are all gone now and their bones reside between her room and the outside, where once a window might have been. 

There are dead mice in the walls and a lonely Girl within them. Her silence is ear-splitting; she no longer remembers how to speak. She keeps the House, she tidies the House, she is the House’s friend. The Girl loves the House, and the House loves her back, and they are lonely together. 

They don’t discuss her family, whom she left for a new life. She couldn’t remember how to discuss them if she wanted to. She grew up too fast; that’s what they told her once. They were wrong. In this House, you don’t have to grow up. In this House, you can be a lonely little Girl forever. 

At night, the Girl lies in bed, listening to the creaking and moaning of an ever-changing, ever-accommodating House, and she thinks about the morning sun. Perhaps it was only a fable, a dream she had once when she was young. She would love to sit under the morning sun with her own friends that she made all by herself, but the House keeps her safe within its walls. It takes care of her, because she takes care of it.

Come morning the Girl remembers that once she had company. She remembers her friends, and perhaps it was never a fable or a dream. “I remember,” she says quietly, finding her voice after these years, and it sounds so weak and foreign. “I remember my friends,” she says to her House without windows. “And under the morning sun we had a tea party. There were cakes and there was music and we laughed and laughed over cards.”

The House creaks and shifts as it unsettles itself with the thought. “But don’t you remember how it ended?” the House says to her, knowing she cannot remember. “The sun sets, and the tea party ends, and your friends leave.”

The Girl, beginning to recall, lies down on the hard wooden floor. “Yes, they left.” She doesn’t know where they went when they left; perhaps they still linger in the House without windows. “Maybe,” she begins, and she knows it is wrong, “maybe home would never have left me if I had never left home.”

The wooden floors of the House hug her as if to mock her. “This is your home,” it says. “Has this not always been your home?” 

But it hadn’t, because once she had a tea party under the morning sun, and once she was loved. She sacrificed it all for a taste of freedom, and ended up a lonely Girl in her House without windows. 

“Your friends left you as soon as the tea party ended,” the House coos. “You were never really loved.” The Girl sits up from the floor and thinks for a moment she hears the mice in the walls. It is soon covered up by the House as it mocks her, “Poor Ophelia, drown yourself in the tears of losing what you only thought you had.”

She listens for the mice again. Didn’t it feel so real? “The sun always sets,” she says, “but that doesn’t mean it was never there.” Didn’t it feel so real? Won’t they come back and prove it again and again?

The Girl was loved or the sun isn’t real—and the House kept her from seeing the truth in either statement.

After years of silence, an unfamiliar noise fills the air. Someone begins to bang on the door. Someone begins to shout a name the Girl doesn’t remember. 

“I think you’re lying to me,” the Girl says with the confidence of a child. “I think you’re lying to me so I’ll stay.” The banging beats against her ears, but she holds her thoughts despite. 

The House is shifting and changing. “Would I ever do that to you?” it asks her. “Do you want to leave? You can walk out the door, but you may never go home. The sun has set, your friends have left, and nothing will be as it was.” 

The banging persists, the shouting is growing hoarse, and the Girl finds herself reaching for the door she has never touched. She rests a gentle hand on the golden knob, but she cannot turn it. Reluctantly, she lets go.

“It’s okay,” the House tells her, knowing it has won. “I forgive you; You were only curious.”

This House is her home. What happens if she leaves her home? It has given her shelter, warmth, and protection. Why should she be ungrateful enough to lose it all, again? 

In her ever-changing, ever-expanding House, the walls shift. They alter themselves, and the door is gone. 

The Girl soon finds that if she listens closely, if she feels and wants it enough, she can still hear the banging on the other side of the wall. In a fit of desperation she tries to claw her way out, banging on the wall and shouting names she doesn’t remember. 

She can no longer stand the fluorescence of her House without windows. She wants to see the morning sun, she wants the light of nature. 

The House is ever-expanding, ever-isolating her from the hope of seeing another human. “Look here,” it says, “I’m giving you rooms, I’m giving you light. You have all the space you could want—I tear myself apart each time you go to sleep to give you something better, don’t you think the least you could do is stay?” 

But the Girl does not hear it, not with all the other noise. She is scouring through the rooms like a caveman. She must have light; she must have warmth. 

The Girl tears out the beams from the wall and pairs them with a mouse-eaten match on the floor. She is on the verge of discovering fire. 

“Have your natural light,” the House says, dejected, “but you must accept that you are destroying everything you have left in this world—you will start from scratch, with no one.”

The Girl strikes her match. “I already have,” she says, and in the blackness of a winter night, she finally feels the heat of the morning sun.

Tegan Anders is a first-year Creative Writing student at the University of North Carolina at Asheville. She is native to rural Western North Carolina and just beginning her journey into publication, after seven years of writing experience. In her spare time, she works as a Stage Manager for local productions.