The first time the house swallowed a sound, we blamed the insulation. A penny fell from your fingers, flashed once, and never landed.
By June, the kitchen had gone almost entirely mute. A plate could burst across the linoleum without a crack. We learned to live by what we saw: your raised eyebrow for the coffee is ready, my hand on the wall for I’m leaving.
I bought a stethoscope to find where the sound went. Pressed to the hallway drywall, it gave me not silence but pressure: rain trapped in the studs, old apologies packed into the joists, the low electric hum of things said too often to disappear. The house had not lost our noise. It had been keeping it.
Then the leak began.
Not water. A thin soprano drip from the attic. One note, pure and sustained, as if a radio left on in another decade had finally found a way through. By midnight, the stairs were running with it. A 1998 fight about the car insurance broke against the banister. The bark of a dog dead thirty years came through the vents in short, ecstatic bursts.
We stood in the living room while the house gave it back. You opened your mouth to scream, but nothing reached the air. Whatever rose in you went straight up, caught fast in the ceiling.
I made it to the front door through the noise. You were still in the center of the room. I could see your mouth moving. Behind me, the walls kept emptying themselves, room by room.