Moving House

by Antoinette Rydyr and Steve Carter

Beyond the rusted iron gate and up the hill sits a house. It has sat empty for a decade or more. Grass grows long all around it, skirting its perishing weatherboards and dirt-encrusted windows.

Its front is adorned by two tall sturdy columns of neo-Doric, which stand perched upon stairs that climb toward the entrance door. They support a gabled porch of dark ashen-grey shingle. The columns’ coat of creamy-white paint is itself coated with the dust of years of neglect.

After being so still and silent for so many years, one frosty morning, in the light of dawn’s wan glow, as everything still sleeps as still as the dead, the house begins to lean and skew. The porch heaves, raises itself. It stretches out, pulling and straining. Cement shingles burst and pop, crash into smithereens on the ground. The decking, which blankets the porch floor, springs up, revealing teeth of rusty nails.

The timbers of the old grey and white house shiver. The boards surrounding it crackle and splinter as it breathes. Paint splits and starts to peel and flake as it arches its architraves. Window panes shatter and explode into shards of jagged glass.

The porch continues its exertion, warping a distorting its timbers, disturbing its balance. It projects forth, twisting and contorting. The columns shed their brittle veneer of skin, sprinkling flecks of confetti to the wind, exposing sinews of muscle fibre.

Each column in turn pulls away and escapes its concrete moorings, takes an awkward step forward. Timbers stretch and fret. Wooden muscles flex, grainy tendons tighten as each step becomes steadier.

Timber stresses and pines as the porch begins to lumber down the hill toward the iron gate. The house quivers and twists under the strain. It lurches to one side, almost toppling, then bears down on its stumps which are firmly cemented to the foundations, tripping the porch’s race to the gate. The house winches in the runaway porch and snaps it back into its station.

The house breathes a sigh of relief and proceeds to renovate itself.

Beyond the front door, inside the entrance, up the stairs, down the hall, within the room on the left lay the heart of the house. The heart’s veins and arteries stretch out entwining the furniture, interlacing with the weave of the carpet and the pattern of the wallpaper, convoluting with the design of the frieze entering the fibres of the walls and the framework.

As a warm sun rises, the rapid oscillation of the heart’s pounding returns to its natural rhythm, beating gently.

Home is where the heart is.