They sat on a bench across the street, their feet soaking in the remnants of the previous night's rain, watching the small house in front of them. Around them, the street was waking, the pre-dawn air starting to fill with sleepy curiosity—and directly ahead of them, quiet uncertainty.
Amad's knee pressed into Yani’s. "This is it, then.”
"Yeah," Yani murmured, trying to shake off the memory of another house dwindling in his rear-view—sad, regretful, and a little hurt, like they all were when he left them behind.
He hated moving houses, especially for someone who did it so often. Houses weren’t people, so they never really understood why he had to go, and it always tore at him, walking away.
"You ready to go in?" Amad's voice was gentle, the words beating out a pattern against his thin-dry lips. There was always a certain sadness in his eyes when he helped Yani move. Years ago, Amad had looked at Yani with those same eyes as he picked him off the dirt of the orphanage’s playground, pressing light fingers against the bruises left by his tormentors, and smiling as they vanished into nothing.
"No," Yani said. He was suddenly so tired—tired of not being able to have the only thing he'd ever truly wanted.
Amad held out his hand. "What must be done, hmm?"
Yani sighed and clasped the offered limb, letting his friend pull him across the street to the front door. The house perked up when they stepped up to her, her red painted windows shivering a little, excitement replacing her earlier uncertainty. She was only a single-story bungalow with a single bedroom, but she was proud of her newly painted front door and her unstained walls, and wasn't ashamed of showing off.
Hello, she said shyly, her voice light on the air.
Yani reached into the core of her—the core of himself—and her door swung open for him, delighted. He and Amad walked in and stood in the foyer as the curtains shook themselves out, pulling themselves aside so light spilled into the room. Suddenly they were pale blue instead of dark. In the living room, the small carpet rolled itself out in the middle of the room, and all the lamps sputtered and came alight.
Yani smiled. He always did like it when they tried to impress.
Amad turned to share his smile. "Not so bad after all, is it?" he said, running a finger on the wooden panel of a doorway. He was the one who’d followed the realtor around, checking the house out for Yani.
No, don't do that, the bungalow said, annoyed. You’ll leave finger stains.
"She doesn't like having her panels rubbed," Yani told Amad, then leaned his cheek against a wall. "Hello back," he murmured to the house. "I'm sorry, he doesn't know any better."
Amad rolled his eyes.
What's your name? the house whispered, reverent.
"Yani," he said, matching her tone. He knew she wouldn't forget. Houses were good with memories, because memories were emotion, and people always left something of themselves behind when they lived in a house. "Happy to meet you. I'm going to be living here now, is that alright?"
Her curtains swayed, yes yes yes echoing in his head like a mantra. As Amad sat on one of the two chairs in the dining area, Yani moved further inward, letting her presence surround him and soak into his mind. He leaned on the thread of their connection, sending comfort to smother the loneliness she'd wallowed in staying empty all these years, and he let something of her soothe his tired heart in kind. She’d be quick to get along with, he knew—houses almost always were—but he could also feel just how much she wanted a companion. A friend.
Amad grinned at him when he opened his eyes, and Yani grinned back. He has been in several houses since the two of them became friends—loved and been loved by them, too. But there was only one house that he had ever wanted to return to. For all that he was set to spend the foreseeable future in her depths, it wasn't this one.
•••
Yani was six years old the first time he heard a house talk. Perhaps it had happened earlier, before he learned to push words out of his mouth, but that was the first he could really remember. He'd climbed out the window to slip his legs through the balcony's rusted railings while his mother aggressively cleaned the apartment when a hoarse voice said wearily, Do you think she could be more careful? My floors aren't what they used to be.
He'd stood suddenly, limbs jerking in surprise, and his mother—just days from escaping his father's cruel fists—had jumped a foot in the air, clutching the broom in her hand in fright.
He eyed the run-down building, "Mama, the house wants you to be more gentle."
"Oh," his mother said, blinking. "Alright."
And tell her it's alright to hurt, the house said gently, at the disregard of those who should care. She doesn't have to keep the pain in anymore. She's free.
Yani relayed the message, and watched his mother shudder and sink to the floor, her face buried in her hands.
•••
Amad was the kindest man Yani had ever met—a fact which reaffirmed itself as he helped Yani settle in, carrying his belongings into the sparsely furnished house. His dark skin settled over rough features, weathered from the mere ancestral memory of the African sun on his father’s skin, and his body had more muscles than anyone could ever need. But he truly was good, honest and kind, and did his best whenever he could.
He was like a cottage, Yani mused as he watched him kneel on the kitchen floor with a bucket of detergent and a long handled brush. Steady and dependable. Dependable because you knew that no matter where life took you, you always had a place to come back to—warm and inviting, with sturdy arms that would never let go. Yes, that was Amad.
Amad laughed himself silly when Yani told him this, nearly overturning the bucket. Then he met his friend’s eyes and said, “Thank you,” like he understood what it was Yani was trying to tell him, though Yani knew he never truly could. Even if Amad could hear houses like Yani could, he lived in a semi-detached building, a fancy side-by-side duplex with a snooty voice and a patronising disposition. Though she liked Yani alright, duplexes were almost always arrogant—something about their design lending them a superiority other houses, even mansions, didn't have—and she'd never quite been happy when Amad invited him to take up temporary residence in the other unit when Yani was between homes. Even without the arrogance, she was naturally jealous and wanted to keep her owner all to herself.
Not like cottages, no. Cottages were safe and secure and kind, young or old, and they loved to love you, with even more love to spare. They were the ones who called out to you on lonely nights: Come out of the cold, dearie, there's a love. You don't want to catch a chill, do you? Or maybe Yani only thought of cottages this way because he'd spent his life with the memory of his childhood cottage clinging to his skin—the one he and his mom had carefully decorated, bit by bit, as she called out helpful instructions. They’d watched the cottage slowly come to life under their hands. She had been the best thing in his life for so long, her melodic voice a soft echo in his head, and losing her had damn near broken him in two. He's spent more than a decade looking for the warmth she gave him between the walls of other houses, but never found it. She had been one of a kind, imbued with his mother's determination to build a happier life and guidance only Yani could provide: the sum of all their best parts.
She'd had the most merry laugh, too, full and joyous. Yani still held onto the memory of it when his days were lonely and his nights were unending: Won't you come out of the cold?
•••
By the time Yani was ten, he'd gotten used to all the buildings he passed on his way to and from school rushing to make his acquaintance, shouting their hellos and inviting him in, uncaring about things like invitations or trespassing. They always had the best stories and weren't shy about sharing, and he loved to sit on their lawns or lean against their fences and listen to them tell him of the world. It had gotten him chased off by their owners multiple times. Once, he’d almost had the police called on him for suspicious behaviour. But it was always worth it.
Their old run-down apartment had remained largely unchanged in the four years they'd been there, its tenants barely acknowledging each other's existence. So it had been quite the shock when he had returned home and found his mother on the front lawn, their meagre belongings spread around her feet and a huge smile on her face. "I got a promotion!" she shouted, bouncing a little, her feet lifting off the ground before she remembered to check herself. "It comes with its own lodgings, isn't it great?"
She rushed back inside. Yani looked up at the apartment building, feeling her sadness settle over his bones. There was a bittersweet quality to it, because she wanted something better for them but didn't want to let go. "I'm sorry," he whispered to her, his eyes stinging. He'd liked her very much, even if she was old and peeling. She'd been sweet with him and kind to his Ma—and Yani never said no to anything that kept the memory of his father's fists at bay—but more than that, she was also the first house that had ever spoken to him and made him realize who he was. "I'm sorry," he said again.
It's alright, she said tiredly, a sigh building up from the very foundations of her. People always leave. You go on and be great now, you hear?
•••
His mother could fly. Not like an eagle, soaring through the sky and leaving clouds behind, no. Just a few feet off the ground. "Levitating," she'd grumbled once. "Fucking useless."
Yani wondered if, had she been able to truly fly, she would have left his father earlier. He never asked, and four years later, when he’d stood by her grave and watched the dirt cover her shrouded form, he wished he'd had the courage to do so.
He sat now in his living room, folding his laundry and smiling as he listened to the bungalow complain about the rain hurting her roof, and remembered when his life changed forever.
The cottage they'd moved to had been a vision, embedded in the land as if it were the conjuring of some happy dream. Yani and his mother had stood at the little gate and stared up in awe.
The house had been surrounded by a thick hedge, partially shielding her from the street. A small lane led past her lawn, up a few cracked stone steps to her cherry-wood door. Her walls had been made of the brightest red bricks, covered by a low pitched roof hanging over a small porch, and creeping wallflowers had settled over her side and over one bay window to merge with the neatly trimmed grass below. Yani had loved her immediately, even before she shook herself awake and said, warm and tender, Welcome.
He misses her with a desperation that shakes him sometimes, makes him afraid, because no one should love anything so fiercely. And houses weren't people—they weren't—but she had still been his. His and his mama's. They'd covered her wooden floors with soft carpets he'd spent many a night doing his homework on while his mother worked. Windows with light curtains shimmered in the breeze, which she claimed tickled sometimes. They’d showered her in love and affection she had returned tenfold. It was in her they'd laid to rest the shadow of the man that haunted them and finally accepted they no longer had to be afraid.
Take comfort from me, she'd said when they walked in the very first time, lay your burdens at my door. You are tired and you are weary. I will carry you the rest of the way.
And they had—for a while, at least. Until the day Yani came back from school and the cottage's fear and sorrow had hit him like a freight train. Oh Yani, Oh Yani, she kept saying, her shutters fluttering madly. Oh, I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. And he'd walked in and found his mother with her head on her arms on the kitchen table, as though she'd only fallen asleep.
She just closed her eyes, just her eyes, the cottage whispered. Grief ran through the walls and underneath the floors as Yani placed his face to his mother's shoulder and wept.
•••
When the state came for him, he'd barely been coherent, his eyes blank and empty—the way you looked when the worst possible thing had happened and you couldn’t understand why the world hadn’t noticed, why everything just kept going on around you.
The cottage had cried as much as a house could cry as Yani was led away, and he'd allowed himself one final look before he couldn't do it anymore.
They’d put him in an orphanage. The multi-storey building, exhausted with her existence and the constant trials of her inhabitants, had no comfort to offer him beyond a murmured, Make yourself at home, if you can. He’d spent his entire time there quietly enduring, tormented by a wound that would not heal: the loss of all that they had been, with no one left to remember but him.
•••
Yani met Khadija two months after moving into the bungalow. It was the bungalow that actually told him about Khadija, the tall pharmacist that always stopped to admire the abode’s fine paint job on her way home from work. The bungalow kept dropping hints about Khadija's long legs and her confidence and her pretty eyes, and—when Yani ignored these hints—flat out told him to go ask her out. Yani, amused and incredulous, indulged her.
The pharmacy building was sleek and shiny, a single storey with a flat roof and huge glass windows. She was calm and unwavering, her constant patience contrasting with her outward appearance and the steady influx of people moving in and out of her doors. Yani cocked his head as he approached, and her awareness of him immediately sharpened, pulling him into her orbit. Oh hello, she called out, pleased. Her voice had a motherly quality to it. Just go on right in, dear, Khadija will fix you right up.
"But will she go out with me, do you think?" Yani asked, raising an eyebrow, grinning.
The pharmacy let out a tinkling laugh. She likes lilies and grilled chicken and music, if you want to give it a shot.
"Thank you," Yani said as he passed through the door, stopping to pat one of her walls. "You've been ever so helpful."
Good luck!
He walked up to the counter and smiled. "Are you Khadija?"
"Yes," she smiled back. "What can I do for you today?"
"My house recommended I ask you out. I can definitely see why." Never let it be said he didn't have a smooth tongue. A lifetime of having female voices in his head would do that.
"Oh, you're one of those!" she said, laughing. There was something about that laugh, with her head thrown back and eyes crinkled at the corners, that pulled Yani in and made him want to stay. His house, it seemed, had impeccable taste.
•••
Once, he and Amad had sat in the backyard of Yani's fifth home since he'd turned twenty-five, eating fried tofu and chicken wings, because someone had to preserve his muscles. Amad had turned to him, headlights from passing cars playing across his face. Behind them, the sturdy apartment block boasted about the integrity of her structures, the treehouse challenging her every word. "What is it like really, hearing them?" he asked.
Yani wondered why it had taken him so long to ask. They'd known each other for more than a decade, and Yani had already asked and been told about Amad's healing, his ability to wipe away cuts and bruises with a single tap. Even a knife wound, once. But Amad had never asked. Maybe he'd known how raw the wound still was.
Yani breathed in and held it, then let it out slowly. The two-storey across the street stopped shit-talking the shed in her backyard to listen. "It’s like... they feel things so strongly, you know? All the people that pass through them—sometimes one family for generations, sometimes people like me, coming and going—they feel it all. So I feel it, too. All the emotions built over their lives.” He paused. Amad nodded at him to continue. "It’s like having another heart next to yours. Another life." He looked up at all the houses around them preening at his words and grinned. "It’s the greatest gift I could imagine."
•••
The tiny studio apartment that came with Yani’s first job when he turned twenty-one was exactly what he wanted: distrustful and ruthless. She had no heart to spare for the constant stream of jaded and overworked students and artists that walked her floors, and Yani wanted no sympathy for his years in the orphanage, no kindness to overbalance the barrel of his hurt. She liked him alright—most houses did after a while—but she wasn't what he needed, and he wasn't what she wanted. In that respect, they were really a perfect match.
With no teasing about his growing pains like the orphanage used to, or worrying about his sleepless nights like his university hostel spent four years doing, and no soothing of his nightmares like that run down apartment had, and no cottage to—
Well, it was no wonder why he didn't stay very long.
It wasn't just her, either. His apartment at twenty-two was too quiet, barely speaking. The four-storey he'd shared with five other people at twenty-three was too cynical. The single-family detached at twenty-four too clingy—her desperation to hold on to him had given the impression of a girl stomping around in a stranger's boots, attempting to don shoes she suspects, deep down, she could never fill.
None of them gave him the feeling of completion he craved: the one he'd only felt while half-asleep on his stomach in a cozy living room, his mother on the floor next to him with her hand on his back, reading out loud, and his best girl wrapping her whole being around him, keeping him safe and protected.
•••
Khadija talked to pills. She explained it to Yani on their third date, speaking around the ends of a chicken bone. "I make them, you know? I bring them to life under my hands and make them. I spend all this time getting to know them and then I have to give them out and watch them leave."
"To go and heal people, though," Yani reminded her, amused at her tone.
She rolled her eyes at him. "Well, of course. But just because it's for a good cause, doesn't mean it doesn't hurt. And yeah, they're not people, but it's never easy is it, letting go?"
His smile faded. "No. No, it isn't."
•••
He dreamt of her sometimes—of that first time he saw her, and all the moments in between. Like that time they'd had to fix her roof when the storm had torn part of it away, and she'd been so scared the roofers wouldn't do a good job, would break her instead. Yani had spent several days with his cheek pressed to her walls, murmuring, "It’s alright, it's going to be alright, you're doing great," before she finally calmed down and stopped dislodging the workers from her eaves.
It was those dreams that led him, one rainy afternoon, down the familiar path to the cottage. He had never been back until now, too afraid of what he'd find. He knew she was occupied, though. Amad had looked her up the minute they'd left the orphanage and reported back, watching Yani with careful eyes.
He could see the occupants now through the windows, their silhouettes framed by the warm glow of her lighting. She was a little weathered, her paint chipping and the lawn yellowing in places, but her voice when she noticed him was still the same: soft and gentle. Yani, is that you?
Yani could never afford her, even if her owners were inclined to sell. She was a beautiful house. Anyone with eyes wouldn't want to let her go. It hurt him sometimes to know that he would never even have made her acquaintance if she hadn't come with his mother's job. He wondered if it would have been easier that way.
Yani? she called out again, sorrow weighing on the string that connected them still. Won't you come out of the cold?
Yani turned and walked away.
•••
"So how did you stay friends all these years?" Khadija asked Amad, leaning her head against Yani's knee. Yani looked at Amad, who raised a diet coke to his lips and shrugged.
He met Amad's gaze over Khadija's head, remembering the first time he'd ever passed a house being demolished. She had been a split-level house, sold to someone who wanted something grander in her place, and her screams had sent him to his knees, his hands over his ears and his entire body shaking. He'd kept rolling on the ground and screaming himself raw until the construction workers panicked and took him to the hospital.
Amad had rushed in thirty minutes later and Yani, his eyes still wet with tears, kept babbling, "She was so young, Amad, it's not her fault she wasn’t good enough for them. She was so young."
Amad had murmured soothing things to him while Yani tried to shake the feeling of the wrecking ball's impact from his skin, her cries echoing in his head in a continuous loop. She'd seemed like such a sweetheart, too. It wasn't fair.
He didn't realise he'd said that out loud until Amad pulled back and swiped his thumbs over Yani's cheeks, taking away the scrapes and bruises caused by his rolling. "No,” Amad said tiredly. “I suppose it’s not."
"He understands," Yani said to Khadija now, finally. "More than anyone I've ever met, he understands."
Amad raised his diet coke in salute, but Yani didn't return his smile.
"What if she gets demolished?" Yani asked, shaken from the recollection. Why had the thought never occurred to him until now? "What if some loser decides she's too old or wants a bigger structure, or—"
"Yani," Amad said.
Khadija looked between the two of them, confused. Yani realized the panic in his voice.
"I know she was a good house, Yani,” Amad said, “but—"
“They’re all good houses,” Yani snapped, then sighed. “But she—she was one of a kind.”
•••
Amad hasn't been around much lately. He said it's because he wants to give Yani and Khadija more time together, but Yani has known him half their lives and knows a lie when he smells one. Besides, his duplex had hemmed and hawed when he asked her—enough to make it clear Amad was hiding something. Houses made terrible accomplices.
Yani wanted to tell him that he thought he might love Khadija, and the feeling might’ve been mutual—even though he kept dreaming about a house she had never met. Even though she didn't understand why.
When Khadija left for a two-week medical conference upstate, Yani spent the entire time wanting to crawl out of his skin. He went to bed and woke up with the cottage in his thoughts and couldn't shake her, no matter how hard he tried.
Two days before Khadija returned, Amad did as well. He knocked on Yani's door at 2:00 a.m. looking tired and sore, but pleased as well.
"Put on a hat and come with me," said Amad. A long life of implicit trust between them meant Yani immediately followed.
It didn't even occur to him to ask where they were going—until Amad drove them up that familiar path, the one Yani would never forget in a hundred lifetimes.
"Amad," Yani whispered.
"I'm sorry it took me so long to save up for her, but she's quite expensive, you know." He turned off the car and turned to look at Yani, a twinkle in his eye.
Yani looked back at him, speechless. "You bought my house? For me?" Something clogged his throat, but it immediately spilled out when the cottage filled his awareness with her melodic voice.
"I had to," Amad said gently. "It was always my plan, from the very first day you told me about her. The very first day."
He's a good one, Yani, the cottage said, joyous and radiant. Where did you find him?
"He found me," Yani said, reaching across to throw his hands around Amad, who held back just as fiercely. They stepped out after a while—wiping their eyes on sleeves—and Yani finally turned to look at her, gorgeous even in the dark, terrifying a little, with how much want of her still riddled his heart.
Amad followed as Yani walked up her lane to her cherry wood door—a little scratched up, but still hers—and pressed his forehead to the wood. He thought of all he had missed with her and all he would get back: the mornings she would ease, the evenings she would quiet. He thought of everything that had happened for her to come back to him, like the plot of the greatest story ever told. He tried to think of what he could say to her that would explain just how much her loss had influenced him over the years, but in the end, simply closed his eyes and said, "I missed you so much."
Oh darling, I know. She was practically shaking, overflowing with love and excitement, and forgiveness too. Welcome back, Yani. Welcome home.
