The House

It must have been at least two dozen years since a human slept on its bed.

Or dined at its table. Or cooked in its kitchen.

People say that murder took place upon this land. Some people argue that it is a case of someone who committed suicide. It doesn't matter. In either case someone died in this place, which makes perfect sense that this place is haunted by some ghost.

The two dozen years of moistening and decaying peels the cheap wallpaper off. Behind those wallpapers are some holes, obvious ones where some ants probably strolled. Rusted locks no longer guard the thin door to privacy; they fall to the floor, and someday in those long twenty-four years the door creaked open, never able to be closed properly again.

There are three rooms on the first floor, including the kitchen and the laboratory. The third room comprises of the dining room and the living room, but architecturally speaking the room is nothing but a wooden table with a weak leg, and a sofa with springs already teared through the fake leather. There is a television, but it is the product of the last century; where antennas are part of the decades-old device.

The hanging lamp above the living room once provided light and warmth for the people who lived in the household. The filaments in the bulbs can't do that anymore. Some day it will collapse; by itself it will never escape the hands of gravity.

The stairs—their universal function is to help people stepping up to higher places. This staircase is no longer one existing for such convenience.

Dust showers the stairs. A proverb remarked that years and years of waterdrop dripping on a stone can puncture it. In typical living standards, dust takes the minimum mass of an object, but one hardly knows for sure which will become the last straw: dust, or the deteriorating inner structure. And they will grow, like bacteria. From one to two to four to sixteen. To one thousand and twenty-four. To one million, forty-eight hundred, five hundred fifty-six. When will the day come where the stairs collapse under years of dust shower?

Upstairs, the second floor, there's three rooms. Apparently this house once belonged not only to a bachelor, or a widow, or a couple, or anything of a family less than three members. Among the three rooms are two bedrooms, and a nursery room. It is referenceable that the older one has a younger brother or sister "stealing" the love which should have belonged to the child.

And that is the house, six rooms, and no one.