Varun Mehta

The Return

There was a house near the edge of the woods. Though the wooden perimeter fence had long since succumbed to the natural world, the house remained. Its squat, boxy walls were paneled with hardwood and the composite roof had been prefabricated decades prior. The silent years had not been kind to the structure, and that composite roof was collapsing inwards in sections, allowing shafts of midmorning light to strike through the crevices and corners in the wood, shattering the invisible relationship set between inside and outside. The paneled plywood floorings inside the walls were sick with rot, curling and peeling and molding as nature continued its time-redundant onslaught on this aging marker of human presence.