1503951243 by Laurel Saville

house. He heard it hiss but saw only two eyes, dark and reflective, before they turned and disappeared. He took a few steps forward and stood in the yard of knee-high grass. He watched another creature covered in fur and stealth slide through a crack in the barn door. A bird called, distant and plaintive. Then silence settled into the overcast air.
    Darius made mental notes. The turnoff to the house had to be almost five miles down a poorly maintained and lightly traveled dirt road. The trees, scrub, and twisted driveway made the farmhouse and barn impossible to see from the road. The land around the buildings sloped upward, leaving them in a kind of bowl that kept the site extremely secluded. Darius did not realize this meant that the cold of the coming season would collect here and stay far into the following spring. Those sorts of concerns were beyond his experience. He went to the barn and pushed the door against its rusted rollers, shoving it aside just enough to peer in. Dim light from a few broken windows worked its way past dust motes. He made out a couple of stalls and a separate area with a workbench and wall hooks. He’d never had so much as a pet turtle growing up, but he quickly filled the barn with an imaginary cow, a goat, and a few chickens. He stepped back into the yard and sneezed. He saw, off to the side of the barn, the decayed rib cage of a structure, with tattered strips of weather-beaten plastic flapping in the breeze. It took him several minutes of staring and the sudden memory of a drawing in one of his back-to-subsistence-farming books to realize this had once been a hoop house. Then he quickly imagined the metal structure straightened, re-covered with fresh plastic, and filled with tidy flats of vegetables getting a head start on spring, safe from cold blasts of air, reaching their green fronds toward the wan winter sun.
    He walked over to the farmhouse. The steps to the front porch were tilted and springy with rot, but they held as he climbed them. The door was locked, so he stepped back into the yard and looked upward. Two rooflines moved away from each other at hard right angles. He’d never been in an old farmhouse, but he filled in what he could not see with mental pictures of a compact kitchen with a tin-top table; a lumpy, overstuffed chair in a parlor; a few bedrooms at the top of a short, steep staircase. He wasn’t sure where these images came from, but there they were, quaint and romantic.
    Yes, he thought. Yes, this will do. This will more than do.
    When he left, he had to get out of his car and step over to the F OR S ALE sign, then rub away some moss and mold to make out the phone number. When he called, the agent asked him to describe the house and where it was. Darius tried, but he didn’t know what landmarks to conjure; some of the roads near there did not have street signs. He’d only found it because he’d been intentionally turning down smaller and smaller roads and had gotten lost on his way back, finding himself finally spit out onto the main two-lane road three towns above the one where he was living. The agent said he’d have to get back to him. When he called Darius a few days later, he told him the listing had actually expired a couple of years back.
    “Do you have any more information?” Darius asked. “Is the house still for sale? Is there someone else I could call?”
    The agent said he was new in the office and had no idea who had originally listed it. He suggested Darius look up the deed at City Hall. Darius found three listings with the same last name as the property owner’s. He called one number, which rang endlessly. The other was picked up by a person who thought Darius was a salesman of some sort and hung up on him. When he dialed the third, a woman answered. He thought he heard her drag on a cigarette as he told his story of discovering an abandoned farmhouse that he hoped to buy. Darius found it strange to say so many words. He had not had much