What Your House Sounds Like

Mrs. Koubková set the same assignment every September for thirty-one years: write down what your house sounds like. Not looks. Sounds. One page. Then she kept them, all of them, in shoeboxes along the wardrobe floor, not just the good ones, every one, the kettle pages and the nothing pages, the boy who wrote "my dad's car, then the door, then my dad" and stopped. She didn't know who'd want theirs back. That was the whole method. You can't tell at eleven which kid is going to need proof, years on, that there was a radiator once that knocked like someone asking to come in.

She kept the loud ones better, she'll admit that. A page about a drum kit takes up a page. A page about a mother humming in another room gets two lines and a crossing-out, and the crossing-out is longer. And the ink goes. And the boxes from the years she moved flats are thinner, and some of them were water, the basement in '97, she says it like a name.

What she won't do is read them. Not in the evenings, not to be kind to herself. Once, the first winter, she did, and found that on the Monday she'd started asking one girl about her grandfather's clock, and only her, and the whole class tilted, and the clock got louder in the girl's next page because a teacher wanted it. So the lid stays on. A record you reread starts writing back. She'd rather be the cupboard than the echo.

Last spring a man of forty-four came to the door with his own daughter and asked if she still had them, and she did, 1993, the blue box, and he read his standing in her hallway, and it was the car, the door, then his dad, and he laughed, the kind of laugh that has a floor under it, and read it out to the girl, who listened like it was news, and Mrs. Koubková watched it go into him, the page she'd kept from reading, going into somebody now, and the sound of that was in her house.