The Son's Room

Lyrics

Up from the Back Hall, leaving the scent of mud and iron behind. Second floor landing. The Portrait Hall watches with its hundred flat eyes, a gallery of successful hunts. I turn away. Down the corridor, past the Eldest Daughter's Room, a sweet trap of lavender and lace. I hold my breath past the Nursery door, that hum of tamed things. Not for me. Never for me. The last door. No name on it.

The air is thick with old instincts. Linseed oil and the ghost of wet wool from 1907. A draft from the north window carries the sharp smell of coal. I take three steps in and the floorboards sing their code, a three-note signal only I remember. This was the den.

Not a son's room. A territory. A place to test the teeth. The brass bed a cold frame for a restless body, the oak desk a map scored with a knife's first language. They tried to sand you away. But the wood remembers the shape of the wound. The ghost of the name is the only name that matters.

The window seat. The board is still loose. I lift it. No soldiers, no marbles. A crow's feather, a river stone worn to a skull, and the button. The single brass button from a sailor suit he never filled. I touch it to my tongue. The cold metal blooms into the taste of salt, the pure, sharp shock of an ocean he only saw on a chart.

And the room turns inside out. In the window glass, I don't see the lawn. I see this room, again, but smaller, and in that smaller room, a smaller window shows the room again, forever. On the desk, the model ship now sails on a sea of woodgrain, and a tiny figure at its helm raises a tiny knife. The sanded patch on the oak desk burns, a sudden phantom limb. I remember carving a name that was never mine, or I remember someone else remembering it for me.

The three notes again. Not the floor. From the dark outside. A call. The radiator ticks like a cooling heart. The smell of oil is gone. Now it is only ozone, and the cold promise of rain. The hunt is about to begin.