This is an empty house; not a stick of furniture left, not even a newspaper sodden with rain under a broken window; nothing to tell us the style of the people who lived here, but that they took it along. But wait: here, penciled in inches up a doorframe, these little marks mark the growth of a child impatient to get on with it, a child stretching his neck in a hurry to leave nothing here but an absence grown tall in a doorway. |