Looking back with adult eyes,
the signs were everywhere.
The house was not a house—
it was an organism pretending.
The walls expanded when we slept.
I measured them with tape.
Gaining an inch each month.
Like lungs inflating in slow motion.
The floors were warm in winter,
not from the furnace, from below,
a warmth that pulsed and varied,
like metabolism, like digestion.
The pipes made sounds
that plumbing does not make—
rhythmic, peristaltic, wet.
The water tasted different from each faucet,
filtered through something alive.
My bedroom was the stomach.
I know that now.
The way the walls contracted at night,
the way the ceiling lowered by millimeters.
The closet was the throat,
leading down into the crawlspace,
where the temperature was 98.6
regardless of the season.
We moved out when I was eleven.
The house stood vacant for a year,
then collapsed in on itself
the way a body does when it stops eating.
The foundation remained like a skeleton.
And from the road you could see the shape of it—
not a house, never a house.
Something that folded itself into corners,
opened a door,
and waited for a family
small enough to swallow.
[Chorus]
The monster was the house the whole time
The foundation was its jaw
The monster was the house the whole time
And we were living in its maw