#idk been rotating a prompt i saw eons ago and this is what came out

[jellydishes]

The gulls screamed like little children over the heights of the old house. The sounds pounded in the way of waves of a far distant ocean, wearing on her day after day after day. One day, she dropped her mouth open and screamed with them. She screamed until her voice withered away to the croak of a raven she had seen once in a museum, stuffed and posed with mouth agape just as hers was... or so she imagined, having never heard it in life.

In the end her voice left her, too, and all that was left was the tireless shrieking laughter of the gulls.

If this had been one of her husband's tawdry horror novels, the house should have stood shuttered and gaping, yawning open for hungered souls. Instead it was bright and airy and full of blue fabric that may have been snipped from a cloudless sky.

She washed those pretty curtains once or twice a week, depending, straining out the muddy brown water until it ran clear. Sometimes there were blots that could almost be confused as being black or red at their core, and she muttered to herself as she scrubbed at the stubborn, relentlessly returning spots.

Within the house, there were corners that took her by surprise when she was unwary, angles that made her jump at the thought that someone she knew awaited her there. Her husband had built the little house into a middling house into a sprawling effigy of stability. Looking at it made one want to lean one way or the other to fix it properly in your mind's eye. The crowded hallways always seemed to bend towards her in such a way that she tried to hurry through them.

It always ended at his portrait.

Sometimes, she almost stumbled to a halt at the sight of his face. Today, she reared back, frozen in place as if she'd been cast in oils beside him.

"I hate you." The words clung to her tongue, unsaid. It would be so simple to say them, but even attempting to gasp them out felt like she were being throttled, choked and left adrift in waters too cold to name.

"I miss you." This came out stronger, but even so it was still a whisper. She couldn't meet his painted eyes, and instead allowed her own to skitter from side to side as if they were two tiny beasts seeking shelter from his eagle-eyed gaze. She made to clutch at her upper arm, but let her hand fall before it was halfway there, turned and made her slow and solitary way through the house.

~~~

The cheerful blue decorations sat atop heavy, dismal disarray in the flimsiest attempt at convincing anyone who cared to look that there was nothing to the shapes beneath. That once they were swallowed by layered waves, anything they had once been would be gone, consumed.

She stared dully at the draped fabric where it lay ponderously heavy over the domed skulls her husband had made his fortune on, and felt nothing. Once, she would have snatched the cloth away with a wordless, inarticulate shriek that she always felt building and building within the cage of her ribs. Now, she allowed her eyes to drift away to the dark, featureless windows. She'd grown tired of what she hadn't seen outside, so she had closed and shuttered them.

There was scratching, of course, but you could grow used to anything if you gave it long enough, and she had her memories of showtunes and nursery rhymes to keep her company when the noises from outside grew too loud.

She hummed one to herself as she mounted the stairs to the old nursery come bedroom. It was brown again, a dusty, gritty color slathered in streaks where she had last tried to clean away filth. She knelt down with soap and water and took her time picking out grit from each of the deep scratches scored into the wood. Every now and again there was a harder, crescent shaped bit of garbage stuck inside, and she tossed them towards the trash backed in the corner without looking.

The time came when there was no more cleaning to do, and so she sat on her son's bed and looked through the open door at the old dumbwaiter, which her husband had expanded as he added floors. There were scratches there, too, but those were a part of the house, she reasoned. They had always been there, as much as the gulls and the ceaseless, pitiless press of noise on the other side of these walls. She could hear all of it now, if she chose to listen.

She did not.

It wasn't her business, any more than the epitaphs written on crumbling tombstones had been her husband's business.

Her business was this house all that lay within it. She knew that in the way that she knew that without a sin-eater to consume her failings upon her death, she would never leave these raggedy corners. It was a calm and simple truth, and it kept her moving in the way that the noises alone may have made her hesitate unto death. She had to keep moving, keep cleaning, keep the house clear of any who sought to invade it.

Her next circuit took her to the basement. This chore took the longest, but she didn't avoid it anymore. After all this time, it had simply become one more task to do in an endlessly expanding list.

There were no blue drapes down here, save where she'd laid some across an expanse of teeth that first night in a vague attempt at offering dignity where there was none to be found. It had turned brown, too, sunken into the crevices of that first invader. He still moved from time to time, but she knew by now that there was no reasoning with him, no help to be given that wouldn't be wasted.

So she ignored the piteous gusts of noise from one throat and simply set her jaw, grabbed their ankles, and dragged them into a pit her husband had dug long before.

That first invader groaned a word, a familiar one that gave her pause. She lowered his feet to the dirt floor and walked up to where the brown paisley pattern fluttered in and out in time with his lies. "You aren't him," she said gently, and even patted his shoulder even though it was a wasted gesture. "My son is dead. He knew better than to leave this house. Whoever you used to be, take that name with you when you go."

He wheezed that word again, but by then she had resumed dragging his filth into the pit.

Her husband had always said words at this point, but she had no more left in her after all of these years.

The bleach container was lighter than it had been last time, and the amonia is lighter still.