Coralville Public Library's Teen Zine
In House and Home by Phoebe
He goes there to pray, sometimes, I think, him with the shaggy dark hair and world- weary eyes that can
stare into my soul. I see him lift open the latch gently, almost reverentially, before he slips inside with
a soft whish of his supple leather jacket. The aluminum storm door clicks him in, protective of its own.
He is metal hard, not by his skin or his bones but by the way he moves and the way he doesn't feel. His face
is devoid of expression when he climbs up the creaking oak- planked steps and into the place where he meditates.
He has never talked to me, and I think and sometimes I hope that he never will.
It is silent inside the house. It has been every time he has gone there. But thunder rumbles in the distance,
and miles away, furious storm clouds build with rising anger. I wait and I tap my foot on the barren ground.
Shingles flap in the wind. It is frightening here, tense with white noise.
Sometimes I wonder why he never speaks. At the home all we know is that his family died, or moved on, or in some
way abandoned him. We know he had a sister and two dogs, and attended Westmill High four blocks east of here.
But I suspect more, and that is why an uneasy feeling now stirs in the pit of my stomach. In my mind's eye metal
flashes and blood pools on the sidewalk. I see the cars that cruised by this now empty avenue, and I know that
inside there were, there are packets of powder and volatile strangers just waiting to go off. There still is a
draining fear around this place, a haunted look I know only too well.