The house would not be sold.
The listing agent called the market funky. Don’t change a thing, she said; a house like this one, blending historic charm with modern updates, would sell soon enough.
Dolores knew better. There was interest, but no one could get as far as the front door. Viewing appointments kept getting canceled at the last minute, always for dramatic reasons: family emergency, car wouldn’t start, water main break. It couldn’t all be coincidental.
The house hadn’t minded Dolores’s benign occupation for the first decade or so, but ever since she began watching HGTV, she’d been making what she called upgrades. She’d welcomed plumbers and electricians inside to fix what wasn’t broken; the banisters and molding had been stained and stripped and painted and stripped and stained again. A litany of indignities. And now the house was getting its revenge.
The only way Dolores could ask its forgiveness was to undo what she’d done.
She gave away the Viking range and reinstalled the old wood-burning stove. She had the rainfall shower replaced with a clawfoot tub. It wasn’t enough. She unplugged the cable box and disconnected from Wi-Fi for a week, as an experiment, but the viewings still got canceled (food poisoning, apparently), so she gave up and plugged it all in again. The television went right to the last channel she’d watched, which was HGTV, and the house’s foundation groaned. The listing took itself off of Zillow.
If she was going to be stuck with this house for good, she thought, she might as well take down the old wallpaper in the guest bedroom, the only part of the house she’d never changed. Dolores had always imagined it would be a nursery someday, but that ship had sailed. It would make a nice home office space, better than propping her laptop on the dining room table. She would choose new wallpaper—something that would look professional as a Zoom background—or maybe she’d paint the walls, if they were in good enough condition.
She peeled away panel after panel of toile paper, skinning the walls and baring the plaster: the connective tissue that covered the house’s old bones, now marred by the remnants of long-dried wallpaper paste. Most of the glue softened when she applied a YouTube-recommended mixture of hot water, dish soap, and baking soda to it, but there was one patch on which the adhesive remained, stubborn and resistant to scrubbing. The stain had a pattern of its own: a human face, small and round, like a baby’s. She decided she’d done as much as she could for one day.
In the morning, Dolores tried again with a store-bought solvent, the kind used by professionals. It didn’t work, at least not the way she’d anticipated. The stain was still there, but its borders budged, making it less round, more oval.
The following day, she did not touch the wall except to measure the stain, which was visibly different: no longer a baby’s face but a toddler’s, the features more distinct than before.
She entered the room each day only to record her findings. The changes to the overall size of the stain were small but measurable; the nose gradually took shape, and the lips grew more defined, bow-shaped.
It was on the eighth day that Dolores first recognized the face as her own.
All that week she was tormented by the awkward, toothy smile she’d presented to school photographers year after year. She declined to take her measurements for a few days, unable to overcome her aversion to her middle-school-aged self.
On the nineteenth day, she thought it was almost like looking in a steam-fogged mirror. After day thirty, the face on the wall appeared progressively more fatigued until day forty-one, when it resembled the retouched headshots that made her look thirty again.
Dolores awoke on the forty-ninth day feeling an optimism she hadn’t experienced in weeks. Having only just turned forty-eight, she had no forty-nine-year-old face for the house to mimic. But the face was still there, albeit with a slightly different expression than the day before, and she tried in vain to scrub it away.
On the fifty-second day, Dolores got her wish: the paste residue began to dissolve on its own. It wasn’t until day fifty-five, when all that remained were faint outlines of a jaw and eye sockets, that she realized there was only one way this house would let go of her.
Originally published by South Florida Poetry Journal, Issue 31, November 2023
Laura Nagle’s flash fiction and poetry have recently appeared in The Sunlight Press, HAD, Trash Cat Lit, and the Irish-language journal Aneas. Her translations from French and Spanish include Prosper Mérimée’s 1827 hoax, Songs for the Gusle, and Adela Zamudio’s 1913 feminist novel, Confidences.
