The Street Grew a House Overnight

I have walked the same block to the bus stop every weekday for eleven years. I could walk it with my eyes closed. Number 22 with the blue door, then a narrow strip of side yard with a chain-link fence, then number 26 with the crooked mailbox. That is how it has always been. There was never a house between them. There was not room for one.

One Monday, the narrow strip was a house. A two-storey brick house with white trim and a red door, weathered, established, curtains in the windows, a number on it: 24. It sat comfortably between 22 and 26 as if it had stood there for fifty years, in a space that the day before had been a gap barely wide enough for a car.

I stopped on the sidewalk and stared. A woman walked her dog past me without a glance at it. I felt the specific vertigo of being the only person who finds the impossible impossible. I actually counted the houses out loud. Twenty-two, twenty-four, twenty-six. There had always been twenty-two and twenty-six with nothing between.

I told myself I had never really looked, that eleven years of the same walk had let me stop seeing. But I know that block the way you know your own hallway in the dark. I know the gap. I have watched cats sit in that gap.

The next morning the house was gone and the narrow strip of side yard was back, chain-link fence and all, exactly as it had always been. I have walked past it every day since. There is no house. There has never been a house. But for one Monday there was a red door, and I would swear to it in any court in the world.