A. J. Gnuse is the author of Girl in the Walls, published by 4th Estate and Ecco in 2021. He received an MFA in fiction from UNC Wilmington and was a Kenyon Review Peter Taylor fellow. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, Gulf Coast, LitHub, Los Angeles Review, and other venues. A native of New Orleans, he lives in Texas.
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SUBJECT: You Are Not Alone
Listen. We know there are people who hide in our homes.
They crawl into attic spaces. Tuck themselves behind yard equipment in garages. Flit between the rooms of the house just outside the reach of sight.
Some of us have found nests tucked in the backs of bedroom closets behind the hanging clothes. Or in the void space beneath the stairs. In that sliver between a living room sofa and the wall.
We have found half empty water bottles and candy wrappers and the remains of leftover food cooked the day before. I found my own wrinkled clothes pressed flat to the floor and stinking like somebody else’s sweat.
Look in the places behind furniture. The spaces beneath beds. Every deep crevice of a house. No guarantee that once one place has been checked someone will not sneak right back into it.
You can stay home all day and still not find them. They are clever and patient and they know the insides of your home better than you ever will. But you have to find them.
You have to root them out.
J.G.
A Nest Beneath a House
The cat, blinking in the afternoon light, padded away down the long length of the gravel driveway. Her paws found the small, flat spaces between the rocks, and the girl, from her vantage point at the guest room window, could hear nothing—it was like a silent film she was just lucky enough to look out the window to catch. But she thought about how, even if she were out there, lying on her back on the lawn with her eyes closed, just beside the lilies the boys’ mother, Mrs. Laura, had planted along the edge of the driveway, she still wouldn’t hear any sound that would cue her that the cat was passing just an arm’s reach away. She loved that.
The calico had appeared in her view as it trod free from the azalea bushes along the side of the house. The girl knew enough about the house—not just the rooms but the insides of the floors and walls between them—to know a small hole in the house’s foundation that could give enough space for an animal to crawl in.
Had she already seen the cat’s nest? There’d been a flattened gray mound of half-decayed insulation she’d noticed a few days back beneath the floorboards. The girl would need to keep an eye out for the animal so she could learn its routines and schedule. She didn’t want to encroach by journeying down below when it was napping, when it was clearly trying to be alone. But the cat was across the road, trotting up the steep side of the levee and disappearing over its lip into the batture. Now, since it was gone, the girl wanted to see where it had been.
Tuesday afternoon, the day the youngest of the Masons, Eddie, took piano lessons. She’d go down anyway, even though she heard them there, Eddie and the piano teacher, sitting at the piano in the dining room. They’d both be facing that wall, the one in which she would descend. Tuesday afternoons used to be a safe time to take the trip, as Mr. Nick was at his afterschool meetings, Mrs. Laura outside in the garden, Marshall at the carwash, and Eddie, typically, tucked away in his bedroom, reading. The piano lessons, an early birthday present, had changed that routine.
But the girl was stubborn. She left the guest room and entered the hallway, the balls of her bare feet treading silently against the floorboards. She opened the door to the attic and climbed the stairs. Pulled free the plywood floorboard and revealed the entrance down into her walls. She’d time her descent along with the piano teacher’s melodies, and with Eddie’s attempts to mimic them. This was her house. She’d done things much harder than this.
Inside the walls, the piano’s keys sounded as though they were underwater. In the dark, she pressed her feet against the wall studs and traced her fingers along the wooden laths to find the miniature grips she’d scraped weeks before. She lowered herself, inch at a time, patient. More than once, the teacher’s melody cut out while the girl’s toes were still reaching for the nearest grip, and she held herself still, awkwardly, until the muscles in her forearms and fingers burned. More than once, her elbows and knees grazed the laths a little too firmly, causing some part of her to wonder whether Eddie’s mistakes—the faltering, hesitant strokes—were from having heard her, and pretending to have not.
“Come on, little guy,” the piano teacher said, his voice rising into a higher pitch than necessary for a boy who was nearly thirteen, almost two years older than the girl. “Just play the notes,” he said. “Come on. Watch my fingers! Just do what they do.”
The girl rolled her eyes. As if the trick to playing well was knowing you were supposed to use your fingers.
The teacher went through the melody again, and she touched her toes down on a floorboard. With relief, she eased the rest of her weight down. Slowly, careful not to graze against the wood on either side of her, she shimmied through with her leg out before her, leading her like a divining rod through the dark.
Two. Three. Four. She counted her steps, brushing the dusty floor with her heel, until she found it. The loose board.
The girl paused. She waited until both Eddie and the instructor began playing their melody at the same time, their rhythm slightly off, Eddie’s stumbling fingers filling the silent rests between. While they played, she pushed down on one end of the thick floorboard, causing the other side to bow up. The board was nearly as tall as she was. She lifted it, gently. Then she slipped down beneath it into the hole, her legs pushing through itchy, rotted insulation until she felt cool dirt under her feet.
Simple. Hardly anything to it.
© A.J. Gnuse, 2021