Our House by Eleanor Lennox

There is someone in our house.
It’s just after 2 am—I’m lying awake in bed.
Loud noises from downstairs. Three people, maybe four.
They’re looking for something.

I get out of bed.
Jon doesn’t wake. Mia nestles into the warmth I leave behind.
I hear a voice coming from the kitchen, pubescent, male.
“Hurry and find it, we’re gonna be late for the show!”
I turn the corner.

I found the note a year after we moved in, hidden under a loose floorboard.
It was still just the two of us, then.

Three people stare back at me.
An athletic woman in her late forties, the mother.
The father, rumpled hair and sweater vest.
And a teenaged boy, tall and thin.
The cabinets are a different shade of blue; the fridge no longer covered with Mia’s artwork.
Everything else is the same.

“Jamais vu,” I say.
“Indeed,” the man replies.

It was a note that should never have been read.

“What year is it?” I ask.
“March 2029,” the boy says.
Four years from now.

What happened to us?

---

I never know when I will see them.
But when I do, they are always late for the show, always looking for their keys.
Sometimes I watch them.
Sometimes I don’t go downstairs.
Sometimes I bring my gun.

I try to forget the note.

One night, I ask them.
“Did you buy this house from me?”
Silence.

Finally, the woman answers.
“Yes,” she says.

Later, I cannot sleep until I realize the reason.
She’s lying.

I try to forget the note.

I turn over and stroke Jon’s back as he sleeps.
Maybe we divorce, and they buy the house from him.
Maybe I abandon my family.
Maybe I’m dead.

I’ll ask them again tomorrow.
Or I won’t.
I don’t want to make them uncomfortable.
But they won’t remember, I know.
I don’t remember someone watching as I danced in the kitchen with my daughter.
And yet, they saw us there.

I don’t know who they were.
We bought this house in a fire sale.

The note read—
You’re dancing in the kitchen with your daughter, and a doll named Emily.

Jon bought Mia that doll.
When Mia named her Emily, I didn’t say anything.
But that night I cried in the shower until my skin puckered.

Your husband comes home and kisses you both.

They say that time is only right now, only memory and anticipation.
But if that were true, why does the future flicker in my kitchen now?

You look happy.

No, time has its own mysteries.
We’re just not alive long enough to solve them.