First sprints of October
The house was large, easily 3 floors and no doubt sporting a large basement. Whether or not the basement was anything beyond an over-glorified root cellar and furnace room? That couldn't be honestly said. It was a hard call whether beyond those brown bricks the house itself was fully built.
Not like their place was. But, hey. With the studs being the only part of the walls painted over, it made it easier to hang things, right? Like her clock collection. The mice hiding behind the big cuckoo just made for a funny anecdote. And it wasn't like the house was dirty, it just had mice. And bad lighting. And way too much furniture. But when you've always got company, you need a lot of furniture, okay? The living room was the ultimate guest room, it even had a walk-in coat closet. They figured the place was half-built because the architect realized they were totally batty.
Anyway, both places fit the city. They'd been incomplete for years and sat in their neighborhoods as offshoots of branches, as dried leaves, too stubborn to fall. You walked to the store and caught the bus there. You rode it to school and realized that those buildings, too. Behind the cement columns painted white, behind the murals the art department erected in the hallways, they were just as half-done.
Yeah, that's why she stayed here. It was cold in the winter, it was cold in the spring, it was cold in the fall. It wasn't cold in the summer, but it did rain all the time. Trees were about the only thing that grew in the city, outside the patches of crab grass that outlined ever crack in the sidewalks and the moss nestled between those sidewalks and the walls sectioning off buildings from these veins of the city.
The house has little grey walls along the sidewalk, and through the iron gate was a smooth expanse of concrete. "Flagstone," like that. None of the teutonic-type deformations found outside the gate. Just smooth and white. It looked like a new playground, which probably fueled part of her obsession with it. It had been built as the state capitol building, originally. That was the story. But then their city lost the bid and it was left, unfinished. The city. And the building. So it became a house. They didn't know if anyone had lived there before the woman. They didn't know if anyone lived there /with/ the woman.
But you'd see the woman. The woman was tall, and broad. The woman's shoulders only accentuated by the grey-green sweaters she always wore. There were balconies, and the woman would stalk them like a watchtower guard. If you considered breaching her gate, the woman would know from her perch there. But the woman never locked the gate. Its chains simply rusted as they continued to hang, the only obvious rot connected to the property. The woman stood as a mythic being, challenging someone to really discover what the house was.
That was their theory, although she was always more enthusiastic about it. He was curious, yeah. But anyone who grew up looking at that place was. It had been locked as kids and, "I don't know. We always figured we'd bet stuck or something if we jumped the wall." So she was thrilled to find a new partner in crime. And he had long hair and blue eyes. Come on. She was pretty sure he played bass, she'd seen him in a band somewhere but was too embarrassed to ask and make sure. They were going to the house tonight, though. That was the plan. She was finally going to figure it out.