The Sick Room

Lyrics

Up from The Foyer, where the light is a promise the house never keeps.
The grand stair groans under a weight that isn't mine. It remembers every ascent.
Second floor. The Portrait Hall is to the left, a gallery of witnesses. Their painted eyes follow me past the closed door of the Master Bedroom.
I turn right, away from the wing that holds The Nursery. I will not hear the ghosts of lullabies today.
Down this corridor, the air chills. The wallpaper pattern repeats a little too quickly, a feverish design.
One last door at theend of the hall. The varnish is worn away where worried hands have pushed it open.

And the waiting begins again. Or it never ended.
The air is a thick blanket woven from a hundred years of held breath.
Heavy velvet curtains swallow the sun. The only light is what leaks under the door.
Here is the iron bedstead, cold anchor in a sea of delirium. Its horsehair mattress holds the imprint of every body that waited here for a verdict from God or the doctor. Usually in that order.

This room is a bell jar for time. 
Outside, seasons turn. Inside, it is always three in the morning.
The Spanish Flu of 1918 shares the pillow with the slow, floral fading of 1963. 
A child's measles from 1982 leaves a phantom heat on the sheets.
They are all here now. All at once.
The room doesn't layer its memories. It holds them in a single, crowded moment.

A bowl of vinegar on the windowsill, from a time when they believed it could absorb a fever. It only ever absorbed the silence.
A chamber pot beneath the bed, a porcelain secret.
A water glass on the nightstand holds a perfect, tiny reflection of the room.
But in the reflection, the bed is empty. Look again, and the tiny bed holds a tinier room, which holds another, on and on. The fever's logic, built into the architecture.

The final exhale of a man in 1924, pneumonia's prize. The sound of it was the precise moment a crack appeared in the porcelain water pitcher.
A thin white line, branching like a river on a map of a country no one will ever visit.
I trace it with my finger. Sound made visible. A signature of departure, fired into the clay.

The house breathes around us. The living go on living.
But this room holds its own. A lung that only exhales.
The slow drip of water from a cracked eave outside the north window.
Drip.
It is the only clock that matters in here.