Rooming House | Sara Dobbie

A face is floating outside my bedroom window, hovering there in vaporous limbo.  An insistent tapping grows louder, and my consciousness sharpens into acute focus. I approach the sill and raise the rotting wooden frame. It’s Hattie, a long dead cousin of my mother. I take her frail hand and pull her inside, her body folding in half like a deflated balloon. I do not question her presence, only listen as she stammers through toothless gums about wanting a cup of tea. 

I return with a steaming mug to find her body gaining strength and form. She sips with greedy lips, then points to the window where another head has appeared. This time, it’s Joe, the man who used to live across the street years ago, before my husband left me for our daughter’s swimming instructor, before our daughter left me to explore the wide world. Again I open the frame, and Joe seeps in like a shadow, spills onto the floor in a loose heap.

Every night more of them arrive, great-aunts and in-laws and neighbors, flimsy, filmy, dressed in the suits and dresses they were buried in. They gather in the living room to talk, sit around my kitchen table waiting for the kettle to boil. They tell me they like the warmth, the light, the firm floor to stand on. They beg me to let them stay, and in exchange they will tell me things, teach me things.

One man with eyes like burning embers thanks me after I drag him inside dripping wet. I wring him out like a dish cloth then stand him upright. “You don’t know what it’s like,” he says, “to wander solitary through a meaningless void.” I welcome him, and tell him that in my own way, I think I do know.

Sara Dobbie is a Canadian writer from Southern Ontario. Her stories have appeared in Fictive Dream, Sage Cigarettes, New World Writing, Bending Genres, Ghost Parachute, Trampset, Ellipsis Zine, and elsewhere. Her chapbook "Static Disruption" is available from Alien Buddha Press. Her collection "Flight Instinct" is forthcoming from ELJ Editions (2022). Follow her on Twitter @sbdobbie, and on Instagram at @sbdobwrites.