August 20, 2025

The Empty House
by Ed Ahern

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The little house was empty for two months. Charles had lived alone there, and he died there as well, softly gasping in a morphine coma. He roused just enough to see me and whisper, “Take care of Agatha.” I tried to ask who she was, but he’d lapsed back into a stupor.

I’d agreed, despite misgivings, to be his executor. I’d already gathered the necessary information on financial assets, real estate and personal property, but the estate proceeds were being contested and all I could do was watch from the sidelines while relatives and charities bickered.

Meanwhile, I visited the house every other day to recover stray mail and check that the gas, electricity and water still flowed without interruption or leak. A house without people develops an echoed loneliness that’s hard to describe but easy to sense. Its mission thwarted, it gently degenerates, dust settling into patina. The food long disposed of, the important records extracted like teeth, the purposeless, worn furniture was left behind in memorial.

One breezy spring afternoon I was rechecking financial and tax records in the second bedroom Charles used as an office. The unused house’s grime and slowly flaking paint were imperceptibly worse, but I got a vague apprehension that someone had been or still was in the house. I checked all the outside doors and rooms, but nothing was missing, unlocked or moved, and no intruder appeared. And yet it felt like someone had disturbed the emptiness. 

Bright sunlight streamed through dirty windows into rooms in bad need of use or emptying. The dust motes swirled only when I moved. But I felt not alone. It wasn’t the specter of Charles, that curmudgeonly bachelor had a much different tone while living and presumably kept it while dead. It felt different, lighter and yet more melancholy than Charles had been.

I perched in the office chair without focus, diverting myself with misgivings about the greedy living. After five minutes, feeling like an idiot, I stood up to leave. And in the doorway dust motes swirled. 

The motes, glinting in the sun, jittered over to a small love seat and paused. The frumpy room seemed to hold a presence. I stifled the flip urge to introduce myself and kept waiting. In that passive, receptive state I smelled gardenias. Impossible, of course, because the unwatered house plants had been dead for weeks.

I felt that awkward social pause of two strangers waiting for the other to speak. I gave in to momentary insanity. “Charles has been dead for a while, you may as well move on.”

The motes danced in some undetected waft of air. There was no real shape to them, but I visualized a middle-aged woman, worn down until her essence was exposed.  A stray thought wandered in. “Agatha?”

The dust particles bounced more vigorously. 

“Okay, Agatha.” I wondered if I’d been somehow drugged, but continued. “He’s gone, Agatha. You’ll need to move along as well. You probably won’t like the new occupants, whoever they’ll be.”

The faint cloud shimmered in the light. There felt like a pause, like a willing listener waiting for me to unburden myself. I’d tried to spare Beth, my wife of lots of years, from the acrimony surrounding the inheritances. I was being offered a chance to do so, even if just to myself.

“I’m guessing you know Charles. No immediate family, but several grasping relatives who he disliked and ignored while he was alive.”

The motes settled into a rhythm, like breaths or beach waves. The gardenia scent was stronger, almost overwhelming the funky, stale clothes smell of the house.

“They want to rip apart his will, ignore his specific directions and divvy up the pile. And I’m the ignorant champion of a dead man.”

In the angled afternoon light, the swirl seemed to tighten and intensify. I blathered on for another ten minutes and when I stopped felt better. The resonance of my harsh words had calmed me, and I left to go home.

I returned that next morning, but the light was wrong and I couldn’t discern any air movement. I came back that same afternoon to discover that it hadn’t been a fluke, that the dust particles were perceptibly swaying. I shifted into my anxieties about being an executor and when finished felt relieved, revealing my concerns to a mother confessor who didn’t require penance.

From then on, I visited the house almost daily, gradually switching from Charles’ situation to my own, revealing my personal angers and fears. The experience was cathartic. Beth became concerned, asking if I wasn’t fixating on the house and poor dead Charles. I tried, unsuccessfully, to assure her that I had was diligently working on estate matters, but she merely nodded and allowed me the aberration.

After almost a year of wrangle and judicial pronouncements, the cousins left frustrated and Charles’ wishes were confirmed.  I was able to schedule the sell off of the assets. And braced myself to say goodbye.

That last early spring afternoon, I went to Charles’ house. Agatha was waiting.

I blurted it out as soon as I sat down. “I have bad news. This house, your home, was sold for a good price, but the company that bought it will tear the house down and put in a zero-lot line, mini-McMansion. You’ll be homeless. I’m so sorry.”

The motes appeared to tighten into cordage, and then, like an exhale, wafted toward me. I felt, I thought I felt, a light touch on my hand, as if it were being patted. Then the dust dissipated and drifted away.

I locked up and went home. Beth was already there. “Are you finally done with that house? Maybe now we can spend some time together.”
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As I plopped into my recliner and picked up the remote, I glimpsed a swirl of air disturbing plant leaves in the corner, and smelled gardenia. “Maybe,” I said.


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Ed Ahern resumed writing after forty odd years in foreign intelligence and international sales. He’s had 550 stories and poems published so far, and twelve books. Ed works the other side of writing at Bewildering Stories where he manages a posse of six review editors, and as lead editor at Scribes Micro.