I dream of an old and ugly house—burnt by the sun and rotted by rain, left to dissemble herself, plank by plank and brick by brick, on the outskirts of some lonely shrinking town. She smells of moldering wood and forest lichens, her gutters choked with vegetation, her attic moaning in the heat. Insects burrow in her hollows—architecting cities and tunnel highways, tending nurseries and graveyards all their own; they feed on the withering carcass: her pine wood, her sagging beams, her body consumed by scavengers and slowly returning itself to the earth.

She is a ruin. From the road you can see her roof beginning to cave. Her windows have been picked clean of their glass–just swathes of shadow now, swallowing the thin winter light. I want to stop and look at her. I want to tell the cars who are passing her by, hour after hour, day after day, that the wreckage is beautiful. Let me show you. Follow me down the rotted staircase that slopes to one side, down to the basement that smells of ash and ancient quarries, limestone and powdered cement: the dust itself a miracle: the dust itself containing the invisible blueprint (a staircase; a helix) of some human being who once stood in this spot and breathed. It’s these ghosts I’m dying to hear.