We called it fencing. We had sex after school on Tuesdays and Thursdays when we told our parents the fencing team had practice. Fencing was a perfectly invisible sport both in reality and as a façade. No one knew where fencers practiced. No one went to fencing competitions whenever and wherever they may have been. With the mild exoticism of the acceptably unfamiliar, fencing’s whiff of sophistication enamored our parents.

So, we fenced, unquestioned and obliquely admired. Two bodies bumping clumsily in a third-floor bedroom. No strategy or knowledge of the rules, just some blind jabbing until the épée founds its sheath. Our commitment to the sport was general and inquisitive, propelled by an unbridled awkwardness, like two untrained figures pursuing interpretive dance. There were lunges and burst of speed, changes of direction and unexpected shifts in balance. Modifications in stance. Improvised maneuvers. Flinching.

Then fencing season was over. The third-floor bedroom sat empty, light streaking through the window blinds to stripe the rippled bed sheets, the only witness to our unclothed scrimmaging. There were no trophies that season. No heartbreak or drama. Only our tender triumph over the perplexing stabs of our own teenage desires. ❦

It was before dawn when the man awoke to a feverish rumbling, deep and earthen. He rustled his pillow and flipped like a trout toward the edge of the bed, while he cursed the interruption to his sleep.

The intense rattling continued, and he blamed a truck, then an airplane, then a helicopter. When he ran out of transportation, he realized that the house was indeed quivering on its own, like a volcano contemplating a significant blast. Then silence. Which was somehow more disturbing. Whatever had happened had finished.

Only when morning arrived did he understand. The stone had pushed itself up through the floor like a gentle beast offering the ridge of its back for utilitarian use. Its surface had been mottled by an inconceivable ancient pressure, at once bullying and resistant. The force had striped the stone with a boomerang the color of milk chocolate. A flexed arm advertising its strength.

There could be no response to the situation other than acceptance. The man patted the stone’s bulk and flatly bid it good morning, as if a calm greeting might soothe the shocking creature. He found he had no memory of the room before this colossal addition volunteered its presence, and so the man built his life around it. Not quite a dream, but a kindly night monster made real in his kitchen. ❦

Henry and Louise were late for the Wellmans’ dinner party because of deliberations about earrings: to dangle or not, specifically. “I’m coming!!!” Louise hollered unprompted from the bathroom. She was aware of her role in their tardiness and already knew the charged discussion that would unravel in the cab.

They arrived still wearing the vibrations of their bickering. At the front door, Louise cautioned, “Let’s pull it together. There’s some big movie person here and the nephew of the President.”

“A nephew...” Henry said sarcastically, nodding his head in mock approval.

They were ushered into the dining room to find a small table surrounded by three chairs and a bench. The hosts and the presidential nephew sat in the three chairs, while the bench held a famous actress from those films in the 1980s that everyone loved. With little choice, Louise and Henry slid in next to the actress, awkwardly wondering if they had arrived on the wrong night.

Guests kept coming—another couple, then three more people, and seven more after that. Each guest was directed to the bench as if it had infinite capacity. The group had little choice but to stack themselves, neatly sitting on heads with feet resting on shoulders until they were a tidy grid, three rows of five people, chatting about vacation plans and the latest New Yorker article about private school admissions. No one—not even the actress—questioned this stacking protocol.

Louise didn’t dare look at Henry for fear that his response might upend the party’s fragile arrangement. Instead, she looked upward at the two people resting on her head, carefully maintaining her posture to support the totem pole of guests above her. The woman at the top of the pile looked down, caught Louise’s eye, and whispered (a little loudly), “I like your earrings.” ❦

“Eeee!” exclaims ebullient Eleanor examining each exquisite entrance embellishment. Ernie enters excessively excited. Every edge echoes eyefuls. Eleanor entranced, ecstatic, eagerly encourages Ernie. Ernie enfolds Eleanor. Epic embracing ensues.

“Engagement?” exhilarated Ernie enquires.

“Eeee!” Eleanor effervescently exerts, ever enthusiastic.

Eventually, enjoyment ends. Emotions ebb. Excuses emerge. Erratic Eleanor evades Ernie’s enamored edicts. “Eeeeeasy...” Eleanor emphasizes, “Encountering exceptional environments evinces embarrassing, exaggerated exchanges.”

“Ending everything?” Ernie embarks, excoriated.

“Exactly.” Eleanor exits.

Ejected Ernie explodes, exiled, exhausted. Except...evidently...elegant edifices exude empathy easing extreme elimination.

Equally engrossing endearment emphatically exists elsewhere, essentially eclipsing exasperating Eleanor entirely.

“Eeeee!” exalts Ernie euphorically. Enter Elaine. ❦

It sunk softly, imperceptibly, into the quiet cotton of fresh snow while its larger sibling stood proud, pushing upward with its usual arrogance and rigor.

The smaller structure did not regret its descent. The noiseless surroundings made for a pillowy silence. There would be no more banging doors or rattling windows, no more flies thudding against the screens at the height of the summer heat or pops in the floorboards as the warm fireplace soothed the cold house. The light fixture in the hall would no longer flicker, and the crack in the plaster would cease to expand.

The building’s retreat marked a return to some unclear, yet fundamental, origin. A magnificent subsiding that might initiate decay or signal eternal preservation. In a thousand years, the subtle slope of the landscape might alert a clever archaeologist to the treasure below: a pristine example of 21st-century dwelling.

And with this gentle plunging, the modest house breathed a final sigh that held the air of every conversation, every snore and argument, every giggle and discussion, every chance taken and suffering endured, every birthday, every shock, every question, every bored afternoon. Until the tender drifts of snow prevailed. ❦

That summer, Lily rode her new two-wheeled bike to the ghost house every day. She would roll to a stop, keeping her left foot on the curb and her right one on its pedal. Her eyes would sweep over the house’s unremarkable façade and examine each window, while her feet remained in their ready position.

No one was ever there, but one side of the double doorway was always open. A moat of pristine lawn wrapped the house’s island and discouraged any approach. No footprints ever interrupted that faultless carpet of grass. No cars ever parked in the evenly graveled driveway. Bloated boxwood sentries stood guard around the house’s perimeter; Lily swore she saw them moving sometimes. Nothing populated the front porch but firewood, no doubt to keep some sinister caldron heated.

As August arrived, so too did Lily’s boredom with this daily, uneventful ritual. Her fatigue required fresh amusement, and so her imagination shifted to satisfy it.

She had heard about buildings that had sunken into the earth, swallowed like the remains of some ancient civilization buried deep below the hum of daily life. How clever, she thought, that the ghost house had been designed in the piercing shape of an arrow pointing upward, a subtle suggestion as to where the structure should reach, should submersion begin.

With this distracting thought, Lily’s foot slipped from the pedal, her toes relaxed on the ground, followed by the full weight of her heel. She would take a new route tomorrow. ❦

He had a cousin with wheels. He’d never met her, but stories recounted that she could glide in any direction. Not just swivel, not just spin, but move—in any direction. Like many fantasies, the idea of that freedom was simultaneously seductive and frightening for a chair of limited experience.

His side of the family had stubby legs and the posture of stolid suburban accountants. Stability was their trademark; the term “sturdy” was invoked in any description along with “lasts a lifetime” and “classic.” If their form had a soundtrack, it would be a low steady beat on a kettle drum.

His latest installation was one of airless perfection, a room holding little chance of revision. The desk stretched in front of him as if designed to unfurl rolls of wallpaper or inspect detailed maps of the Nile. From his fixed vantage, it seemed unreasonably wide. Maybe his cousin’s wheels would have diminished that feeling.

Indeed, everything intriguing sat distinctly beyond the chair’s bounds. A row of books sufficiently worn and artfully curated (Calvino, Twain, Duras, Dostoyevsky) were buttressed by a jar of sharpened pencils and a white canister of uncertain purpose. A small clock taunted the still life by introducing time into its composition.

And so, the wait began. The chair’s unhurried surveillance of this sparsely populated surface. Its patient craving for human interaction. The chair knew this fate. He had been raised to recognize the signs and readied himself for the inevitable: years of hushed and tolerated stillness, the cruel destiny of idle elegance. ❦

My mother considered the clouded mirror in our downstairs bathroom a wildly sophisticated design gesture, not knowing that it had been originally developed for convents to temper vanity and encourage interior contemplation among the devout sisters. Ours was coated with a surface that removed any visible reflection.

I stalked that mirror. I would dip unseen into the bathroom, stretching my neck to look upward, trying to understand all the overheard fuss. I climbed the gargantuan height of the counter and scratched at the surface with anything I could find—toy cars, a hairbrush, my own jagged nails—to undermine the mirror’s magic. There could be no interior until my exterior was established: the very planes and borders of my being.

When a strip of mirror was finally revealed, I watched the contours of a forlorn face register a pouting displeasure. I saw all the frustration and bewilderment contained in my plump five-year old body as it stood on the countertop, my thick legs straddling the sink. I immediately leaned closer and pressed my nose against the mirror’s surface to make myself disappear. ❦

When she left, Edith took the bell with her, somehow knowing it would devastate him. It unscrewed easily, gradually spilling off the wall like it desired Edith’s company, then fell into her warm hand to receive her touch. Like Edith, perhaps the brass bell simply needed to rest. No longer dangling at the ready, its clapper instead slumped against the bell’s interior wall. Edith admired its indolence.

For 134 years, this simple instrument had heralded visiting callers, proclaimed the arrival of deliveries, and corralled neighborhood children as the evening light dimmed. It was the sound heard just before the news that Walter would not return home from the war, that Benjamin had arrived to take Clara to the dance, that a thick envelope from the university admissions office had been delivered for Julie. All ghosts now, but united by that same airborne announcement.

Cliff, the man Edith was leaving behind, liked the idea of the bell, its traditional aesthetic, but he bristled if she used it. “Don’t be such a child, Edie,” he would snap when she defied him. Edith never saw Cliff again. Sometimes she would ring the bell to remember why. ❦

Peter registered that, again, no dreams had punctuated his sleep. He blamed the things missing from his new bedside table, namely the mountain range that had once extended across the surface of its predecessor. Where were his lusts and aspirations, the Bic rollerball pens, the tissues, the applause and miseries, the purloined hotel note pads, the books wilted and darkened by subway travel, the scented candle never lit, the pile of discouragements, the pharmacy reading glasses smudged to mimic thick fog, the rainy days and sleeping masks and disconnected cords, the misplaced ambitions, the useful stash of joy? How could his mind dream without those resources to draw upon?

Peter paused to consider how he might recreate that magic. He first removed the artfully styled flowers, foreign interlopers to the native land he sought to restore. He placed a pen on the edge of the now pristine surface and felt like the table might tip violently under its weight. He snatched it back quickly and reconsidered.

A tectonic shift had occurred with this new table, and the landscape would need to respond. The former expanse would have to peak. With fresh energy, he piled all his old supplies one atop the other, shoving aside the bedside pendant lamp until the ceiling was reached. Wedged between the nightstand and that ceiling now stood a towering library of dashed hopes and post-it notes, matchbooks and punctilious reminders, crumpled desires and hatched plans, novels, biographies, some bubbling exaltations, an instruction manual in three languages, empty mechanical pencils, a long-dried orange peel, the chills of dawn, a few sore muscles, and some mildly perverse fantasies.

There would be dreams again that night. Thick, marvelous, burstingly beautiful dreams, plucked from this vertical garden with all its luminous melancholy. ❦

Photo credits (in order): Chris Mottalini; Floto+Warner; Matthew Williams; Dustin Aksland; Chris Mottalini; Sarah Eliot; Matthew Williams; Mirror, Matthew Williams; Matthew Williams; Matthew Williams

ELIZABETH ROBERTS ARCHITECTS: COLLECTED STORIES

CHRISTINE COULSON