by: m.s. fuller

Help me to find you.  The city is empty tonight.  The city is empty.  Empty.  Words are not enough.  I come from Bellows Hall.  I come from there, from my day of tending the yard and curating the exhibits and exhibiting the collections and collecting the names written upon the guests’ register.  They come and they go and I say, “Welcome to historic Bellows Hall.  The suggested donation is ten dollars.  If you go upstairs, please watch your step – the staircases were hand-built and do not meet the conventional dimensions for modern staircases.” 

And, at the end of the day, I run my hand along the fieldstone walls where they, stacked one upon the other, rise to meet the timbers and I look again for the places where the old residents had carved their children’s names into the walls.  We’ve found teenagers trying to carve their own markings – this, of course, is not allowed.  The walls have enough memories.  If any new memories were added, the old ones might disappear, might vanish, might be forgotten forever.


Help me to find you.  I’ve finished my day at Bellows Hall where I walk through its six-and-a-half bedrooms (the half-bedroom also serving as a half-dining-room).  Serving, of course, being the present tense and, as such, is the proper conjugation of a verb that is applied to a thing that is still in existence; however is not the proper conjugation of a verb applied to the past ministries of a structure for its long-dead residents.  No one has been served by the bedrooms for two or more centuries now.

The grass is well-kempt.  The willows sway like bathed elders in the afternoon sun.  The house is quiet.  Thick timbers and plaster keep out the sounds of the wind except for a whistle here and there where a draft wiggles through mouseholes and scurries through the seams of walls and scratches through ant-paths.

The house knows itself.  Its joints.  Its aches.  Its drippy noses.  Its updrafting flues. 

It’s known its residents: their births, their departures, their aged deaths, their tragedies and small joys. 

I have left the place for the day.  Turned all lights off save for the foyer lamp that glows over the guests’ register where visitors can leave their own rememberances inside of college ruled journals.  Molly from Kentucky; Davis Family from Mount Vernon; Pierre and Rosalie from Iowa… and on and on.

The house will settle itself for the night, the fieldstone shrinking ever so subtly in the chill of sundown, the floors creaking here and there where feet once trod and where feet no longer wander anight. 

Help me to find you.  I am now out and about.  And the city is quiet, buttoned up, scrubbed and tubbed.  And I am out and about, my old home a home no longer.  My old home is forgetful of my tread, forgetful, forgetful.