To the inhabitant of the attic,

Lucy Zhang

Lucy Zhang is a writer masquerading around as a software engineer. She watches anime and sleeps in on weekends like a normal human being. Recent publications include: Ligeia, Ghost Parachute, Twist in Time, MoonPark Review, and Tiny Molecules. She can be found on Twitter @Dango_Ramen.

When we first moved into the house, I desperately wanted to meet you. I asked my dad to lug his ladder up the stairs into the master bedroom closet so I could climb the rungs and prop open the hatch access door. But my mom said your home was full of dust, possibly mice and even bats hanging from the ceiling, circling your head. Do you have a head? She didn’t want all of her business dresses and blouses to get dirty.

I left a few traces of the outside world for you. A ripped corner of loose-leaf paper rubbed with pine, the remains of autumn leaves crushed to flakes, a snowflake on my glove that I tried to run over to you but that melted by the time I kicked off my snow boots at the front door, pressed petals of a Common Meadow Violet, a firefly I caught with my bare hands and released into my parents’ closet, hoping its glow would catch your eye from behind the ceiling door. I figured that from the attic window you only got to see the driveway and the single cherry blossom tree in our yard. Just outside of your window view was the neighbor’s Northern Red Oak that always had something hanging from its branches: pinecones covered in peanut butter and seeds, a birdhouse painted turquoise and purple, Christmas lights that never got taken down.

I remember sitting through a lecture wondering if I was really living life midterm exam to final exam, vacation break to vacation break, and then I realized you probably had no concept of a year—only that today’s moon would be a waxing gibbous, that the Big Dipper would continue to revolve around the celestial poles, that rain would eventually restore the grass’s green. My professor asked me to derive the general solution to the wave equation and while I wrote out a differential equation and wondered why people preferred chalk to whiteboard markers, I also knew you must be watching the first snowfall of December. Beautiful, right? I don’t recall if I walked out of class mid-derivation, but when those white bits and pieces fell onto my eyelashes, I blinked them away before they turned to water. I took my first footsteps through untrampled snow and wondered how I could carry it all back to you.

I can’t imagine staying in one place my whole life. Nature doesn’t change nearly as fast as people do. Not even when you construct a fortress around yourself, layer planks of wood against each other and patch the cracks with clay, dig a moat around your bounds and fill it with magma. It deflects everything: the sound of a professor’s voice lulling you to sleep, the glimpse of a homeless man sitting in a wheelchair, his ankles swollen to the size of a small tree trunk, the metallic aftertaste and burn of alcohol. The magma both drowns and incinerates the mailman, silencing knocks at my door, although I wouldn’t have gotten up anyway—not without my hair brushed and my ears adjusted to human speech, not without tugging on a shirt and pants and fixing the bed covers and donning some dignity. Instead, I too can look out the window and measure how blue the sky is against the sky from yesterday, five years ago, ten years ago, a barometer of my memory.

I remember standing a drywall door’s width away from you, hands cupped, offering the world in the form of dead skin cells and petrichor. You’ve got your own fortress. I suppose I shouldn’t have been so surprised when I was met with silence. You probably couldn’t hear me either.

Best,

A past inhabitant of the house.

Issue 10.1