CW: none.

The idea for this story began in my final week at the Clarion Writers Workshop. I wanted to write a haunted house horror story using stripped language, but unsurprisingly, it became strange and detailed and maximalist. It’s the perfect piece to summarize my time at Clarion, as it was collectively inspired by all the great stories I read over the summer of 2023.

–OII

There once existed a couple who dreamed so desperately of buying a house. They lived in the heart of Benin City, and their names were Esie and Paul. Esie was a laid-off Chemistry teacher who became an event decorator and contractor, and Paul was a resident heart doctor. Esie and Paul got married in the summer, in an event hall that smelled heavily of bleach. They both had no family. The cake tasted like greying Styrofoam. To save money, Esie and Paul decided they would not have very many friends.

In the first year of their marriage, Esie and Paul stayed in a one-bedroom apartment at the intersection of Sapele Road. The apartment was on the fifth floor of an unpainted building with broken windows and an absent fire extinguisher. An unseen cat scratched on the wall every night. Outside of the windowless windows, owls hooted and sang. When Esie and Paul got up for work the first daybreak after moving in, they found ghosts hanging upside down from their curtains. They didn’t get out of bed. Eventually, they realized that the longer they stayed in, the less likely they would make rent, and so they rose. When the couple returned from work, the ghosts were already cooking a group dinner over the stove, which was coconut rice and vegetable stew and beef curry. Esie and Paul gathered at the table and ate the food in one giant swallow that left space for nothing. The ghosts tried to conversate with them, but the couple were far too full for a discussion, and so they went to bed. In the morning, the ghosts hung upside down from the ceiling fan with freshly made plates of breakfast, and Esie and Paul each took a pancake and went to work.

At the end of their first year, Esie got a lucrative decorating contract, so she and Paul paid the first-year deposit on a small estate in a complex just outside of Ihama Road. The couple left the old apartment at dawn, to avoid the early morning traffic rush, to avoid the ghosts, so they got into a decrepit-looking moving van without so much as a hello. The complex that Esie and Paul relocated to was full of grey and yellow bungalows that clustered together like dominoes. At the top of the complex gate were broken Fanta bottles which were arranged to form a straight line, and at night, Esie and Paul heard whispers from their new neighbors through the walls. Their new neighbors talked to them, saying hi with voices that sounded like cat scratches. The couple did not say hello back. Their new neighbors welcomed them into the complex, and all night, voices boomed from their walls, rambling on and on in introduction. For the next few weeks, Esie and Paul received housewarming presents from the neighbors that came in the form of luxury furniture and nineteenth-century artwork. The presents were always given through the wall, and the couple often accepted them on their way to work. Sometimes, Esie and Paul would come home and feel the imprint of a neighbor’s nose on their kitchen sink, the imprint of mouths pressed against their living room ceiling, fingerprints on the surface of their toilet. But they didn’t say anything. The couple regularly slept with headphones on.

So it was in their third year of marriage that Esie and Paul bought the house, when Paul became a full-fledged heart doctor and Esie became a luxury event decorator who had a booming store on the corner of Ring Road. The couple moved out of the estate at dusk, packing their bags with a quiet hurriedness. They were careful not to disrupt the snoring walls. The neighbors did not know that the couple was gone ’til the house was empty. For many days, they kept whispering through the walls. The couple had taken the luxury furniture. The place where the artwork once hung now contained nails.

The new house that Esie and Paul moved into was a two-story building full of bright white walls and a shiny chandelier that hung from the ceiling. A gold-plated banister led them up a paneled flight of stairs to a second floor with three spacious bedrooms. In the night, when Esie and Paul walked through the new house, the space seemed to lengthen with their movement. When the couple entered the beds, the ceilings grew higher than ten feet tall. When Esie and Paul went to use the bathroom, the walls would go whiter and whiter until they covered it with muted paint. When Esie and Paul came back from work, there would be no one to greet them but the kitchen sink, which grew larger and wider; the gold bannisters, which always caught the sunset light; the stairs, which never creaked or rusted; the chandelier, which glimmered so brightly and made them feel for the first time that they were truly haunted.

But you bought a house, the couple’s colleagues asked, when they complained at work. Esie and Paul didn’t know how to describe it. It was not the house itself. The problem was that it was nothing. And one fateful night while Esie and Paul slept, that was when they finally saw it. The true face of nothing. They Bought a House swirled through their dreams as an endless white space, growing and growing in magnitude, pulling all of their teeth and eyes and skin and teeth and stomachs and beings and they bought a house they bought a house they bought a house¹ they bought a ^house they bought a “house” they bought a house they bought a house they bought a house they bought a house they bought a house! they bought a HOUSE they bought a house they bought a house they bought a house they bought a house!! THEY BOUGHT A how could you ever leave us and that was when Esie and Paul got out of bed in a haze of sweat and realized what they needed to do.

That night, the couple stood by the gate of their old estate complex, Paul holding up a piece of nineteenth-century artwork, Esie pressing her lips to the walls. That night, Esie and Paul waited outside the door of their old apartment, each holding a plate of pancakes, each waiting for something.

The next day, Esie and Paul woke up to see the ghosts hanging upside down from their windows, offering them breakfast. When the couple walked down the stairs, they could see the neighbors’ tongues and mouths protruding like gifts from the walls, rambling on and on with tidbits from the morning news. As Esie and Paul gathered their things by the door to go to work, every part of the house, from the living room to the gold banisters to the upstairs balcony, said goodbye. And how full it was, that synchronized something, when Esie and Paul said goodbye for the first time as well.

¹. Congratulations!