It was those imposing façades, awned eyes ranked in rows, pillars flanking the door like canines guarding a mouth, the maw of the house, and a seventh bulging eye that drooped down beside the mouth, allowing the house to watch anyone approaching, to be aware of them, to open its door, to swing it sidewise like the ravenous jaw of a mantis.

It was that image that always sustained their nighttime ghost stories, made the house central to the night’s dark entombment, that loomed up in both their minds when the light switch clicked and their mother pulled the door to their bedroom closed and the moonlight’s colorless light meant that any pool of shadow might, just might be blood. They would huddle together beneath their blanket, whisper, grip one another when the wind rattled leaves along the gutter.

But today they were even more frightened, for that morning they had crept up to the sunlit side of the house, where only three eyes, mere slits marched up the wall. They had always thought they were safe there right up against the bricks, that the squint-eyes could not see them as they sat and plotted against this troll of a house that kept them from going any farther down the block. They began their daily chant “Lonely Brick House fall on down, fall on down, fall on down, Lonely Brick House please fall down...” when Amy looked up over Emily’s shoulder, her eyes open wide. “...Oh, Emmy, what if those are ears, not eyes. What if the house can hear us when we come to chant?”

Emily had just begun to follow Amy’s gaze when they heard the slow screeching moan of the door opening. They both crouched down, crept, pulled by some overwhelming need to know, toward the stoop. They both peeked round, only the right halves of their faces, their eyes wide as saucers, jutting past the edge of the brickwork; the angled late morning shadows of the awnings made it appear the windows were straining to look down at them, and the door was almost wide open when they popped up, turned and ran for home, their legs moving so fast they might have been churning buttermilk.

An ancient wrinkled and wizened lady stood on her top step, watching the two children scurry away. Her black cat curled himself around her ankles. She sighed, half-heartedly swept at the steps with the broom she clutched in her gnarled hands, then bent to stroke the cat’s arching back. “Oh, my sweet,” she purred back to him, “just potato and leek stew again today. But perhaps tomorrow there will be some more savory bits to add. Perhaps, tomorrow.”

She turned, and they both stepped back into the house, and the door, in closing (if anyone had been there to watch), gave an impression, a fleeting, but chillingly unmistakable suggestion, that the house just might be licking its lips in anticipation.

* Publisher’s Note:

The Lonely House (etching, 1922), by American realist painter and printmaker Edward Hopper (1882-1967), is held by Whitney Museum of Modern Art. The etching does not appear here, as it’s under copyright by heirs of Josephine N. Hopper. An image and details are available online at:
https://whitney.org/collection/works/7010

For more about the artist (and his muse and wife, Josephine), see Jessica Murphy’s essay at The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History (June 2007):
https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/hopp/hd_hopp.htm

Links above were retrieved on 20 August 2023.

Roy J. Beckemeyer’s

latest poetry collections include The Currency of His Light (Turning Plow Press, 2023) and Mouth Brimming Over (Blue Cedar Press, 2019). Stage Whispers (Meadowlark Books, 2018) won the 2019 Nelson Poetry Book Award. Amanuensis Angel (Spartan Press, 2018) comprises ekphrastic poems inspired by modern artists’ depictions of angels. His first book, Music I Once Could Dance To (Coal City Press, 2014), was a 2015 Kansas Notable Book. With Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, he co-edited Kansas Time+Place: An Anthology of Heartland Poetry (Little Balkans Press, 2017). His poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize (2015 and 2020) and for Best of the Net (2018), and was selected for The Best Small Fictions 2019.

Beckemeyer serves on the editorial boards of Konza Journal and River City Poetry. A retired engineer and scientific journal editor, he is also a nature photographer who, in his spare time, researches the mechanics of insect flight and the Paleozoic insect fauna of Kansas, Oklahoma, and Alabama. He lives in Wichita, Kansas, where he and his wife recently celebrated their 60th anniversary.

Please visit author’s website for more information about his books, as well as links to interviews and readings (scroll down his About page for the link-list).

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Megarhyssa, ekphrastic poem by Beckemeyer in MacQueen’s Quinterly (Issue 14, August 2022), nominated by MacQ for the Pushcart Prize

⚡ The Color of Blessings in MacQueen’s Quinterly (Issue 5, October 2020), nominated by MacQ for the Pushcart

⚡ Featured Artist in KYSO Flash (Issue 12, Summer 2019); showcasing Beckemeyer’s poetry, prose poetry, and insect photography

⚡ Words for Snow, a prose poem in KYSO Flash (Issue 9, Spring 2018), which was selected for reprinting in The Best Small Fictions 2019