On a venerable road north of town a Victorian house sat empty for two decades. Wild grape vines and roses covered the
front porch. Queen Anne’s Lace covered the drive. Tall grass stretched around
to the back and rolled out behind.
Inside, oak mantels slept under a blanket of dust. A walnut banister
curved up to the second floor where closets in bedrooms held secrets and relics
from the past.
And up there, at the end of a hall, was a room where soldiers
stood in rows with cannons, bayonets, and drums. Battles were fought. And a
young boy ate oatmeal in the morning and took baths in the evenings while
the sun slid behind the tall pines.
His mother read to him at night.
But on a mild spring day he took to his bed,
and from that he never recovered.
In the years beyond there were no more children, and his mother
filled her stale afternoons in the room with the soldiers and cannons until she
was dry as an Egyptian tomb. How often she folded the sheets back on an
empty bed.
As time went on the house bore a river of all things past and it
lived to repeat them over and over. What eerie sounds it learned to make until
one day when the gravel road gave way to bulldozers and men in trucks. The
sound of the distant highway grew nearer.
The war room took notice.
And before one wall came down cannons fired from the second
story window at the equipment below and blew pieces of metal into the sky. Again,
and again the sounds came like none the workers had ever heard. That was of course
before they drove away.
That night the boy, the soldiers, and the mother looked out into
the autumn sky.
For now, the house had won.
The War Room is from The Blue Hour: Flash Fiction (available on Amazon)
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