Whispers Beneath The Floorboards
Before the girl with the listening heart came, the house had forgotten how to breathe.
It lay silent in the woods, skin of crumbling stone, bones of timber soaked in time.
Shutters hung like closing eyelids. Floorboards wept beneath the weight of stories left untold.
Once, there had been laughter. Once, light.
But time had a way of swallowing both.
And then came the silence.
The kind that burrowed into walls, curled beneath staircases, and stitched itself into the corners of mirrors.
The kind that waited.
Some say the house was cursed.
Others whispered that it kept too many memories, and they rotted from the inside out.
But those who truly listened—those who dared to press their ears to the floor at night—
they knew better.
The house wasn't haunted.
It was grieving.
And grief, when left too long in the dark, becomes something else entirely.
Now, footsteps return.
A child with quiet eyes.
A mother with buried memories.
A house that stirs.
And the first whisper comes again—soft, splintered, aching:
"She's here."