When you're eight years old, a house looks like a castle.
Even when it's nothing but bricks, broken glass, and the smell of wet cement.
I still remember the first time I saw ours -
half-built, stubborn against the wind, standing alone in the middle of an empty stretch of land that seemed too quiet for a place so new. No other homes. No streetlights. Only a thick blanket of heat and the hollow sounds of a place not meant for living yet.
I sat outside it, on a mound of rough sand, my bare feet sinking into it, the grains clinging to my skin.
My hands were dusty. My knees were scraped from climbing over half-built steps. The world smelled like dust and the promise of rain.
A street dog wandered over - lean, ribs showing, its tongue hanging out of its mouth.
It collapsed onto the sand pile, as if we both understood that this was a waiting area.
Waiting for walls.
Waiting for something else.
And then it came.
A sharp, metallic screech.
Not the sound of tools. Not the wind through the empty hallway.
It was something alive - an ugly, wailing sound that came from the direction of the tamarind tree, a twisted monster of a tree about fifty, maybe a hundred meters away.
I turned to look.
Nothing moved.
The tree stood against the dusk like a black wound stitched across the sky.
But the dog...
The dog's body went rigid.
It let out a low, desperate whine -
and then bolted.
As if something unseen had snarled in its ear.
I stayed sitting, heart hammering, a child's stubborn bravery rooting me to the sand pile.
The silence returned, but it wasn't the same silence anymore.
It had thickened. Grown teeth.
Later - much later - I would tell myself that was the first time it noticed me.
The first time something ancient and unfinished dragged its gaze across the bones of the house and found me sitting there, waiting without knowing I was waiting. That was the first time the house spoke to me.
It would not be the last.