The room smelled of firewood. Like someone had been burning a fire in the fireplace, which was an obvious feature of the living room. But it was cold, the room. The first room in this house near the one I was staying in. In Bruno, wherever that is.
This house was a bit smaller, having a living room, dining room, kitchen, and bathroom. That’s it. The bathroom had only a shower stall. No tub. It had the same strange toilet that I had at the place I was staying.
Though I felt impelled to rifle through the cabinets and drawers, I did not do so. I only glanced in the bedroom. It was a full or maybe an irregular queen sized bed centered in the room against the back wall. There’s a medium sized window in the left wall, letting sunlight filter in. I was not sure how sunlight managed to pass through the dense forest canopy, yet it leaked into the bedroom through the window. I saw the dancing dust particles in the light.
The kitchen was spare and well-appointed. I did not go through the cabinets or inspect any of the appliances or utensils. It had a very greenish-blue feeling to me. Not quite minty. A bit more blue. I did catch a glimpse of a small table with two chairs, very much like the one in the house I was staying in, but the seat cushions were in ideal shape. There was a fleeting feeling of jealousy that I did not notice until I was back in the living room, inspecting the fireplace. Why did I not have pristine chairs from a matching set? Why were mine mismatch? Why was one uncomfortable looking and the other had a gash in its seat cushion?
I had no answers to these questions and only barely noticed their arising and passing. My attention was on the fireplace because there was a human-like silhouette barely visible along the bricks.
I studied the posture of the silhouette and found myself thinking of kinesics, meaning the way bodies express communication without words. There was definitely a fear. A great and terrible fear. Like one might have for their very life. There was a cowering, too. The body had folded itself down to become smaller. Bodies tend to do that to avoid notice or to seem weak and uninteresting, unchallenging, yet sadly that often provokes or emboldens others instead of deterring them.
I craned my head around inside the fireplace itself and could see a handprint and some signs of scuffling in the ash. She—the body belonged to a woman—had tried to climb inside the fireplace, back first. So she had backed away from someone or something, backing into the mantle first, then cowered and shrank, then tried to back into the fireplace as a way to gain shelter and protection for whatever it was that was frightening her. She had not made it.
There was a second sign in the ashes, a long groove that told me she’d been dragged out and away. I traced it across the floor and saw bits of ash still there, though not many. It had likely been swept between the time she was here and when I was there looking. She was not the occupant of the house. I was not certain of what I was seeing that directly confirmed that, but the totality of the examination gave rise to my knowing it.
I went outside and stood on the front porch. It wasn’t a stoop. There were no steps. It was a flat porch with a very simple pitched roof and unadorned, square posts. It was added later, after the construction of the house. I could tell because the materials of the posts and ceiling were clearly newer than those of the proper house, and I could see that the level of craftsmanship and detail was far less.
The path into Bruno ran to the house where I was staying. Further up, on the right, was this house. I had set out that morning to explore and made it only this far. Maybe fifty paces up and to the right. To this house with the owner not home. To the woman in the fireplace and whatever her fate might be.
