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She wails in her sleep and wishes for the end. The ghosts try to comfort her, but they are bad company. Their ethereal murmurings are too hard to hear and she is so tired of asking what they mean. They are cruel to one another and to every living thing that comes near to them, feeding off of their terror and eventual deaths. They do not dust or tidy. They do not see that she is falling apart around them. 

If she’d a head, she would shake it at them. If she had a mouth, she would demand that they leave her worn body. If she had arms she would throw the things out. Instead, she sings to herself or she lays quietly waiting for the final moments of decay as she looks out past the degraded driveway and the unseeded garden. 

There is still life out there. Not just the feather-light movements of insects and arachnids, not just the indecisive starlings or chickadees, who build a nest in her eaves only to abandon it, not just the vines that break through her frames around her windows.

No, beyond the fields and growing brush and the encroaching forests, there is a road upon which there are cars and inside which there must be people. And maybe, sometimes more than people. Dog or cats. 

How she misses dogs and cats. She never thought she would. The cats stained her beautiful wooden floors with their smelly markings and the dogs chewed on errant moldings and doorways after tracking in mud and dirt, but they provided warmth and noise. And, so very often, toddling after them there would be children. Children came in all sorts of shapes and sizes. Like ghosts, but without the chill and the bitter anger (usually). And those children came with parents running after them or disciplining them or talking about them with one another endlessly after the children finally found slumber in their respective bedrooms. 

She misses them: the pets, the children, the parents. Family. She misses family. The smooth interception of music echoed in halls of peeling beauty. Skin stretched over the bones of ancient comfort. 

The house sighs and her shutters wave about listlessly. A rabbit hopes close to where a few strangled raspberry brambles still fight for light. It nibbles a dandelion and then it’s nose raises and sniffs around. The house would hold her breath if she had one. It’s such a pretty, lively little thing. 

Unfortunately, she is not the only one to notice the creature. One of the ghosts, the skinny one who came to her most recently, whispers across the floorboards of the front porch. The rabbit hops closer and before she can slam a shutter to scare the poor thing away, the ghost reveals his ugliness to the rabbit, scaring it until its soul leaves its body and it floats up, up, up, and then is gone with a soft pop. 

The body of the rabbit lays there for hours, forgotten except by the ants. The ghosts grew bored as soon as they achieved their grisly goal and left, but the house watched over the fluffy thing until sunset. Then she shifted her attention to the ghosts in the attic, where the ghosts had begun a new project of pulling the rest of her insulation out of her rafters

The house sees this destruction and the core of her, her very foundation begins to crumble at last. She weeps and the siding rattles as she shudders. 

The ghosts look upon her now in wonder.

And then she tells them in her way, the peeling of her wallpaper and the cracking of glass, that she is at her end. She can go on no longer. She can feel it in her very framing. She is going to collapse. It will be a matter of weeks, if not days. 

The ghosts beg and plead, but she can only sag heavily having said her piece. Dust falls from the rafters at the shuddering and shifting and debris catches in the ghosts' smoky bodies. 

That night, the ghosts are quiet and the house slumbers more peacefully than she has in many, many years. 

As the sun breaks over the trees she blinks her windows blearily as she listens for the familiar sounds of her phantom inhabitants, but they are still and quiet. She opens the right windows to catch the wind in just the right way to whistle for them, but they do not appear. 

"Hello?” she calls with the wind as her vocal cords, but there is no answer.

She reaches out beyond herself, listening and feeling for them. 

It is only then that she notices something odd other than the disappearance of her spirited guests. 

The corpse of the rabbit is gone. 

Her consciousness waits on the edge of her stairs for the rest of the day. The sun is low in the sky when her loneliness crumbles the mantle. It falls with a heavy bang on the wooden floors and it’s both too loud and not loud enough. 

She has pushed even the specters away and now she is even emptier than before. 

She watches the sunset over the front of her porch and tries to enjoy the beauty, for after today she will crumble and fall.  

Only, there is a terrible racket in the forest that disturbs her view. The wicked starlings have taken flight and there is the violent sound of short, alarmed wind with a force that concerns her - almost like a bark. 

And there, out of the forest bursts a familiar form: the rabbit. Alive again, it zig-zags around the yard and throws itself under her porch. She thinks she can feel the heartbeat of the creature, but when she listens harder she realizes it is not the heart, but the sound of steady bickering inside of it's decaying body. 

The wind bursts out of the forest, black fur and floppy ears and a thunderous set of feet. It is not the wind - it is a dog. A dog, she sees now, with a red collar. Someone's pet. And as she thinks this, a child emerges, gasping for breath. She has hair the same color as her dog's fur and a dress the same color as his collar. 

"Don't hurt it, don't hurt the bunny," the little girl gasps as she catches up to the beast, who must be double her size. The dog jauntily runs back to her for reassurance and is then back at the trail, sniffing all around the porch for his prize.

The girl pulls at her pet's collar until he relents.

The house straightens herself up as best as she can. She opens the windows and sweeps away a bit of the heavy dust. The ghosts float up through the floorboards as they watch the little girl take her tentative steps onto the stairs, her dog at her heels. 

The house is desperate for the girl to like her, but how can she with these naughty things in the house. She angles windows to push the wind at their backs, desperate for them to leave, but they don’t leave. Neither do they jump into the girl's body or expose their hideousness to her. The dog doesn’t seem to notice them either. 

Please, please, please. The house thinks. Please, do not harm them. Do not scare them away!

The girl peruses. Her tiny fingers tickle the doorframe. She draws a heart in the dust on the kitchen counter.

“This can be our house, Sticks,” she says to her dog and he wags his tail when he hears his name, then he finds a cool bit of ground to lay down on as he keeps an eye on his charge. 

The girl opens the cabinets and pulls out a heavy old pan and a cracked wooden ladle. 

“Let’s play kitchen,” she says aloud and the house imagines she's talking to her. 

The house pops open a cabinet just a little to show the girl her treasure: bone china with a yellow rose pattern. 

“Oh! Sticks, look how pretty!” the girl exclaims when she discovers them. She pulls over a chair to reach the items, but the chair is loose and brittle. The house can only look on as she teeters over, her bright brown eyes opening wide in surprise and fear as she falls backward, the back of her head in a perfect trajectory to hit the corner of the old kitchen table.

The house groans as she reaches for her. Opening her cabinets and desperately sending wind to catch her, even though she knows it will not be enough.

The ghosts sweep in then, as the house expected they would, always excitable around the surprising morbidity of things. She wishes she could tell them to stop, to leave her new little inhabitant alone.

The ghosts encroach and the dog barks and the house wishes time would stand still. 

But it doesn’t. She can not look and turns her consciousness to the clouds outside until it’s over. Except. There is no bang of the girl's head on anything, nor the heckling of the ghosts, not even the barking of the dog (and what good was it anyway if the thing didn’t protect his girl?). So she returns to the kitchen and finds an unfamiliar sight. 

The dog’s teeth are holding fast to the girl's blue, knitted sweater, and the ghosts have piled themselves up and are pushing with all of their meager earthly strength to right the falling chair. 

They helped her. They saved her. 

The girl hops down and she notices the twilight. “Time to go home, Sticks. Don’t worry, we can come back tomorrow.” 

The girl skips out with her dog in tow. The ghosts follow her out, but they do not follow her into the trees. Instead, they slip into the clouds and are gone. The house crumbles at last.