The house had a name before we arrived: Black Gull House. In the brochure it looked sun-struck and serene, but in person the wings sprawled farther, the moss had crowns, and the windows stared too directly at the sea. The door was painted a hungry red, a shade that looked black in certain weather and feral in others.
We were five: Mira and Sloane, who argued about verb tenses; Jonah, with his portable keyboard; Henry, who kept one hand wrapped in a scarf; and me, Clara. A driver dropped us at the porch and left without ceremony. Inside, the foyer smelled of damp paper and pennies. Typed notes in a bowl told us: Write at night. Hand in pages by morning.
Dinner was roasted chicken none of us had cooked. The potatoes bit back with pepper. The faucet turned on by itself. We looked up at the sound, then at one another, pretending not to be unnerved. The house seemed to watch us.
Writing Nights
At ten we gathered in the parlor. The fireplace gaped wide, a stovepipe jammed into its throat. We wrote in silence while, somewhere else, typewriters cleared their throats. Mira sketched in furious strokes of charcoal. Jonah typed softly, the keys barely a weather. Henry dictated into a recorder, his voice grave but gentle.
I wrote badly—words like “tide,” “salt,” “breath.” My sentences felt like stones turned under in a river.
At midnight a bell rang. We followed its sound to a red door marked Submissions. A narrow slot cut in the wood waited for us. We slid our pages through.
In the morning, our work returned marked in thick, brown-red handwriting. Mira’s note: Less prettiness, more witness. Sloane’s: Stop using love as a spice. Henry’s: The Year of Not Climbing Ladders. Jonah’s pages he wouldn’t show.
Mine said: Tell me about the raft. What color is your brother’s mouth in the water? Don’t say you didn’t see. Say you looked away.
The Raft
Behind the house, a steep path led to a cove. A raft bobbed on the water, anchored by chain. One glimpse and I was back years ago—my brother Eli balancing on wet boards, toes in the air, the red life ring behind us. He had gone under once and not come back.
That night, the writing bruised me. Every sentence left a mark: “tide” raised a welt on my arm, “death” numbed my tongue. When I wrote “brother,” the hair on my arms stood straight. The house demanded confession.
Disappearances
On the second morning, Sloane didn’t appear. We searched, called her name until our voices rasped. In the library, recipes in her careful hand had been pinned to the wall. In the margins were truths disguised as measurements: You let a thing simmer and think that will keep it from burning. You keep stirring. It burns anyway.
“She’s gone,” I said.
“People go through doors,” Henry murmured.
Later, Mira planted knives in the lawn and pinned a canvas to the grass. She painted the cove, but the raft she made into a net of lines so tight nothing could fall through. In the golden hour the canvas pulled her in. “Tell them I wanted to try,” she said—and vanished. Only the knives remained.
Into the Water
That night the red ink on my pages said: Stand on the raft. Otherwise, you are only telling me a rumor about fear.
So, I went. The cove water was cruelly cold, biting every nerve. I lowered myself from the ladder, floated, then dove.
Through fogged goggles I saw the chain, the boards, the slick rope spine. And the memory: Eli’s body, his mouth blue in the water. My chest cinched.
When I surfaced, Jonah was waiting on the path. He didn’t call out, only asked softly, “Are you going under again?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll wait.”
On my fourth dive something inside me broke open. I surfaced and the words escaped without consent: “I don’t belong here.”
For a terrible second, I thought I meant the house, the ocean, the world. But no—the not-belonging was my brother’s. It was the story I’d carried too long. It belonged to the sea, not me.
I climbed onto the raft, lay flat under the gray sky, and felt lighter than I had in years. The boards rocked with the tide, forgiving.
The House’s Reply
That night I knelt at the red door. “Please,” I whispered, ashamed, “give him back the pieces that belong to him.”
In the morning my pages smelled of salt. The red hand had written, You did not leave him. He left the part of himself he could not carry. Do not be polite and keep what was never yours.
Jonah’s pages bore a crude bird sketch and the word Wait. Henry’s showed a ladder with only two rungs. He laughed once, softly, and pulled the scarf over his hand.
After
We left three: Jonah, Henry, and me. The house eventually released us, as if it had wrung what it wanted.
At home, I returned to work, writing about candle sales and sofas that should be couches. Yet in the margins of my notebook, I wrote about rafts without writing the word raft. I wrote about salt without tasting it.
A month later, an envelope arrived. Inside were my pages, the red notes faded to gray. Tucked between them was a small wooden life ring, painted red and white. On the back, carved: Open.
So, I do. Every morning, I open a page. I write, sometimes about furniture, sometimes about the water, always toward the shortest path through.
I am not fixed, but I am writing. The house remains by the sea, acting on me like a verb. When I say Eli’s name, it is still a prayer. When I say mine, it is too.
Sometimes at night I hear the echo of a bell that once called us to submit our pages. Sometimes it is only in my head, but I rise anyway and put my feet to the floor. I list the doors I’ve gone through—house, ocean, raft, page—and feel less afraid.
Black Gull House is still there. I imagine its windows open to the tide, the red door waiting, the raft rocking in patient rhythm. Maybe another group has arrived, and the house is marking their pages in its ugly, necessary hand. Maybe someone else is standing on the raft, saying aloud the sentence they never meant to say.
And if they do—if they say, “I don’t belong here”—I hope the sea takes it from them, the way it finally took it from me.
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