A Haunted House In The Prairies
Read more poetry by Britt Wolfe
From a distance,
it presents as ordinary—
a low, obedient structure
under an unbroken sky,
weathered but compliant,
the kind of place the land accepts
without comment.
The prairie is good at that.
At keeping its mouth shut.
Those who pass say the house endured.
They admire this.
They mistake endurance
for virtue.
Inside, the geometry is wrong
in ways that evade measurement.
Hallways elongate under scrutiny.
Corners compress the chest.
Doorframes recalibrate the spine
without permission.
The floorboards retain a precise knowledge
of pressure.
They respond only at certain weights,
certain hours,
as though memory itself has a trigger.
Nothing announces itself.
Nothing needs to.
The haunting is infrastructural.
It exists in the calibration of silence,
in the way the air disciplines the lungs,
in the long apprenticeship to fear
that begins before language
and survives its acquisition.
People speak of ghosts
as if they were interruptions.
Cold spots.
Errant sounds.
Minor disturbances to an otherwise intact reality.
They do not mean
the curriculum taught here.
How terror can be normalized
through repetition.
How a child can be trained
to metabolize threat
until it reads as intuition.
How stillness can be praised
as goodness.
How compliance can be mistaken
for peace.
The house never announced its damage.
No fire.
No collapse.
No visible reckoning.
It remained.
Which is precisely the problem.
Because what remains
does not rot evenly.
It embeds.
The ghosts learned
to migrate inward—
into posture,
into breath,
into the subtle choreography
of always knowing where the exits are.
They manifest only in repose.
They speak in borrowed tones:
reason, responsibility, hindsight.
You’re safe now.
That was years ago.
Why can’t you let it go?
The house does not answer.
The house has never been asked
to justify itself.
It learned survival
through internal evacuation—
keeping the exterior intact
while rendering the interior
uninhabitable.
And then, one day,
the cruel inversion reveals itself:
There is no house.
No structure left to indict.
No foundation to point at
and say this is where it happened.
There is only the survivor—
upright, functional,
mistaken for whole.
A body that carries rooms
it no longer recognizes.
A nervous system retrofitted
for permanent occupancy.
They say the house was demolished.
They say the land recovered.
They say whatever lived there
did not last.
But ghosts do not require buildings.
They require continuity.
And when the prairie wind rises—
wide, unopposed,
indifferent as ever—
the survivor feels the walls close in,
not because the house has returned,
but because it was never a place at all.
It was a child
who learned how to stand
without making a sound.
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