Familiaris

by David Wroblewski

When Walter glanced back to check on her, a terrible sorrow washed through him. Sorrow for Ida; for her strangeness, or the strangeness that had been visited upon her. Sorrow for himself, too. He supposed it might be self-pity, though what it really felt like was grief, for if Ida truly had come to the end of her unnaturally long childhood, it meant he, Walter, was about to lose a burden that had long since been transformed into devotion.

Early in their courtship Mary had told him that she believed a house was an idea written in a language of shapes, and if the idea was sound a person would know, even if it looked like a hovel from the outside.