And then we heard scratching in the walls.
The noises began after a large flock of birds flew from our roof in an all-at-once theatrical flourish.
The scratching, the trickling of fallen house innards, the stretches of silence, the unmistakable return—on every floor we hear it and wait to hear it again.
Horror sounds that seem to come from the walls, the vents, the pipes, but it’s all echoes of things in the attic.
The attic, accessible from a tiny hatch in the ceiling of my office closet—a nothing space, previously just even layers of insulation and a single gold chain—suddenly a maze, a city of perforated blue popcorn tunnels carved by things discarded by fussy birds,
things that bred,
things that will soon nibble through and crawl into an oversized stuffed animal, scratching their fluffy limbs into grotesque human approximation, shiny plastic eyes staring at a woman twisting into a knotted oak tree with ribbons.
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