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This House of Hopes, This House of Bones

By Cynthia Zhang

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My husband is home again. I cannot hear him well, not with the ringing in my ears and the throbbing headache making every movement agony, but the ghosts keep me informed. There he is, slipping off his coat and shoes at the door and placing his briefcase on a drawer; there he is in the kitchen, chopping vegetables and tasting the broth for salt. The worried caretaker, ever careful of my comfort.

The ghost with ribbons in her hair strokes my arm. She is the youngest of my visitors, with a round, heart-shaped face framed by curling ringlets that reach the middle of her nightgown—a picture of Victorian innocence, skin white and smooth as a doll. A knife gash winds around her throat like a ribbon, blood spilling down her dress like rubies.

Transparent fingers reach for mine, squeeze with more strength than you would imagine a ghost could possess. A voice scrapes inside my head, soft and high like whispers in the wind. Now, she whispers, now, now, now.

But I cannot get out of this bed.

---

It was the winter after graduation when we first met. I was working at a bar, two years toiling over an MFA translating into everything I had been warned it would: a cramped studio bedroom and a minimum wage job, resume after resume sent out only to disappear without even a rejection letter sent back. If my mother was still alive, I could imagine exactly how she would have reacted—an arched eyebrow, the slightest twist of her immaculately lined lips. Well. Didn’t I warn you.

And yet, recalcitrant daughter to my core, I kept trying. There was a local gallery that had expressed interest in stocking some of my paintings, and my friend Henry had offered to split a booth with me at a craft pop-up. I was submitting to residencies and contests, drawing portraits of anime girls and D&D characters for online strangers willing to pay my fees. It was not much of a life, but it was mine, and I held onto it with all the greed of a thief.

I heard him before I saw him, dress shoes clacking on the floor as I rearranged bottles behind the counter. Just one second, I called, taking down an empty bottle of Hennessey’s, and when I turned around, there he was: an apparition of clean cologne and a crisp navy suit, a faint burn scar on his wrist visible beneath a watch that likely cost more than my entire year’s salary. His legs were a mile long mile long in neatly pressed slacks, and the top buttons of his dress shirt were popped open to show glistening, golden skin.

And those eyes—deeper and more intense than any blue I had ever seen. All my paints faded in comparison to that shade, the intensity and clarity of it. Like the ocean, or a cloudless sky on the first day of summer.

I wish I could say it did not work on me. That I made it hard for him, forced him to work to prove he was more than money and glittering charm. I wish I could say I was stronger than that, smart and old enough to not be swept away by a fancy dresser and pretty eyes.

“Hello,” he said, smiling at me with those impossible eyes, and I was gone.

Two months later, we were living together; two months after that, he proposed.

---

A week after the proposal, we went to see the house.

It was raining when we got there, mud splattering against the car as we drove down narrow rural roads. The grass squelched underfoot as we walked, weeds brushing wetly against our thighs.

The house loomed against the trees: an old, Victorian structure with dark blue roof tiles and windows that shuddered and shook with the thunder. A bent weathervane surveyed the scene, a rusty rooster that seemed one strong gust from blowing off the roof. The paint was faded where it hadn’t peeled away entirely, a color that might have once been shining white but was now a speckled light gray.

There were leaks in the ceiling and cracks in the siding, but it was a house, two stories with an attic and basement and all ours—a place where I would never have to ask permission to install a heater or paint a wall, where I would never have to worry about management banging on my door at eight in the morning or suddenly raising my rent. A house—our house. Mine, mine, mine a greedy refrain in my heart.

He took my hand.

“We’ll make it ours,” he promised.

---

There are many things I want, now that it is almost over. A morphine drip, a hero to come save me, something to eat that isn’t soup or porridge and the ability to keep it down. The chance to go back in time and stop that foolish version of myself from ever accepting a stranger’s number.

More than anything, I want to know how he did it. It would do nothing to change the outcome, but it would be something to grasp onto, a definite name and cause to pin the pain on.

But there are any number of tasteless, odorless chemicals and compounds to slow a heart. Arsenic, flaking off antique wallpaper and hiding in vintage lipstick. Antifreeze, so sweet animals will lap at spills. Carbon monoxide I know for sure, though in the end it was only one of the things making me sick. I have been living in this house for months, drinking its water and breathing its dusty air. There is no telling what he may have been hiding in my water, my food, the pills he brings me twice a day.

Perhaps if I had been smarter, more wary, seen the red flags as he showered me with gifts and candlelit dinners. Perhaps if I had caught on earlier, when the poison was just a trickle in my veins, something that might leave me with trembling hands and thinning hair but not death. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.

The girl with one eye sits at the end of the bed, long red hair pooling over the sheets. If I look down into the empty socket, I can see into the empty cavern of her skull, no blood or skin or wet brain but a great yawning darkness. Alive, she had been beautiful—prom queen and cheerleading captain, the type of girl who had only to bat her eyes for the world to fall at her feet. The type of girl who, since childhood, had been told to follow her dreams and sincerely believed it, unable to imagine a world in which she could not succeed.

Los Angeles was larger than her sleepy suburban town, and home to thousands of striving actors and models, but she was undaunted. Long shoots, demanding directors, coworkers who thought appearing in one B-list drama made them stars—it didn’t matter how cheesy the scripts were or how many men at the diner leered at her as she took their orders. She just had to get lucky, just once.

He was not an agent or a director, an agent of providence ready to hand over her big break, but he was luck all the same. My husband came into her life with roses and champagne, designer jumpsuits and a tidy little bungalow in the LA hills. Fame and fortune had not found her, but the world shone a little brighter, glowed a little softer when his hand was in hers. She had a beautiful home, a doting husband, and enough work to keep her dreams of stardom alive. A Hollywood ending, shot in brilliant Technicolor.

And then one day he came home from a business trip, a blue silk scarf as a souvenir. She tilted her throat to let him put it on her. His hands were soft and reverential, until they weren’t.

There was a struggle. In desperation, she’d grabbed a letter opener, managing to score bloody lines down his arms before he wrestled the blade from her and thrust it through her eye. He torched the house after, sleeve catching on fire as he fled the scene, then spent the next decades lying low in Europe and South America, the scar on his wrist the only reminder of his time in LA.

It is unfair to compare, with my husband’s dead bride sitting at the foot of my bed, but I cannot help being jealous. Hers was a cruel, violent death, but at least it was quick. There was none of this tedium, lying helpless in bed and wondering how next my body will betray me.

If the poison does not kill me, the waiting will.

---

It began with the pipes. They were old, like much of the house, the water slow to warm and slower to arrive, as if resentful at being summoned from its rest. Every now and then, the water came out reddish from rust, and the only thing to do was to let it run until it was clear.

But it was an old house, and such quirks were to be expected, endured until we could get the remodeling properly along. In college, I put up with rats and leaks and roommates who let their dishes pile up in the sink for days. For the pleasure of being able to touch the walls and know I could paint them any color I wanted, I could put up with a little rusty water.

It was like a second honeymoon, those first few days of moving in. I flitted from room to room, making notes on wallpaper and moth-eaten furniture that needed to be replaced, walls that could be repainted to better complement the spill of natural light. Never mind my home decor had previously consisted of IKEA furniture and thrift shop knick-knacks. I had money and time now, and I intended to use them.

And so it was, one evening, waiting for my husband to return from work, that I set myself to the task of making mushroom alfredo for dinner. I was not a particularly skilled cook, but the instructions online looked simple enough, and I wanted to do something nice to mark our first week living in the house. My husband had given me so much—designer bags and trips to Michelin star restaurants, a hundred things I would never have been able to afford without him. A warm, filling meal was the least I could give him in return.

Halfway through chopping mushrooms, the knife slipped. At first, staring blankly at the red staining the cutting board, I felt nothing, and then the pain hit all at once. I hissed, clutching my hand to my chest. The knife clattered to the ground, narrowing missing my foot. On instinct, I stuck my hand in the sink and turned on the faucet.

Black water washed over my hands, thick and oleaginous.

A plumber came the next day. Knelt on the floor of the kitchen and shook his head: the pipes would have to be replaced, and probably the water boiler as well.

The price he quoted made me wince, but my husband took it in his stead. He booked us a hotel room while the workers tore through drywall and old wood. We ate room service in bed, lounged by the pool in the evenings when it was only us and the lights of the city before us. And when it was over and we drove back, the house was good as new: the walls patched up and painted over, no sign that they had torn open a few days before. I tried the faucets in the kitchen and the bathrooms, and the water ran clear and fast and hot.

At nights, though, I thought I could still hear the pipes creaking.

---

Time twists, stretches. I shiver, burn, tossing off the fleece throw with what strength I have left. Shiver again, too weak to gather the blankets from the ground. I will have to wait for my husband to come home before I can be warm again.

And in those long hours before he returns, I wonder. What was it about me, in the end, that made him choose me and not some other girl? I lived in a studio apartment, making forgettable art in my spare time, and while I wasn’t ugly, I had plenty of friends who were far prettier. I had nothing to offer him, this rich, handsome man, nothing going for me beyond being young and moderately attractive with the right makeup on. Was that it, then? Had he chosen me for my youth, another unlucky victim for some vampiric exchange that stole away years from my life to add them to his?

When I tell her this, the drowned girl shrugs. She is the oldest of my ghosts, a tall, pale girl with dark wet hair and a dress that drips spectral water onto the sheets. Perhaps he kills us for immortality, sprinkles our ashes into his coffee to preserve his eternal youth; perhaps he does it simply for sport, the way children will pull the wings off flies to watch them struggle. A collection of hair and wedding rings in his study, something to admire on late nights between wives. My ghost would not know—she had lived with him for a year, but he never told her his secrets.

But oh, what a year it had been. He came into her life like sunshine after stormy weather, a stranger smiling as he handed her the notebook she’d dropped on the train. In her world of gray skies and hand-me-downs, he was a ray of dazzling color with his gold hair and crisp blue overcoat, a fairy-tale prince smiling as he held out the book she had dropped on the train.

He bought her chocolate, books, wine-dark roses that filled her dark tenement apartment with the smell of spring. Shyly, she let him read her poems, the ones she wrote during stolen moments at work, and he admired each clever metaphor and melodic turns of phrase. Rubbing lotion into her wind-chapped skin, he told her everything he could give her if she was his: shelves thick with leather-bound books, her own among them one day as well; brilliant, beautiful dresses the color of moon and sun and sky; soft, white bread and crisp bacon each morning, fruit in all seasons and a stomach that would never again ache for anything. A house in the country where her mother could recover from an illness borne from years of breathing in city smog, and good schools for her brothers so that they would never have to dirty their faces with soot or risk their fingers in factory machinery.

He kept his promises. A year she moved through that house as if dreaming, dressed in satin and shimmering silks—and even at the end of it, when he held her thrashing head under the water, he cared for her family. Her brothers finished their education and found jobs as law clerks and barristers; her mother grieved, but she died in comfort, surrounded by her children and the scent of spring flowers. A happily-ever-after, with only one dark stain.

In between bouts of fever, she shows me her wedding ring. It is silver, engraved on the outside with filigree flowers and on the inside with their initials. We admire the way the metal catches the light, the way the ring shifts on her finger from opaque to transparent depending on the angle and the time of day.

My ring, tight on my finger and far more solid than ghostly metal, is rose gold inlaid with emeralds. We had picked it out at the store together, and he had bought it there and with a matching band for him. In health and sickness. In sickness and health.

---

The insomnia came next.

A month after the pipes were fixed, I began waking up in the middle of the night, gasping for breath without being able to remember more than winding hallways and looming figures. Melatonin didn’t help, nor did valerian or moon milk or any of the other remedies Dr. Google suggested. And so, late at night, as my husband lay snoring beside me, I slipped out of bed and headed for the attic, where the work was.

It was not, to be honest, very good work. Ever since moving into the house, I had found myself in a creative rut. Before, my problem had been scraping together enough time between jobs to paint. Now, with endless time in front of me, not a single idea felt worthy of committing to canvas. The thousands of ideas that had seemed so brilliant to me while washing dishes now seemed hackneyed and childish, the daydreams of an art student who thought every idle idea was a stroke of genius.

But there was an artist residency in Colorado I wanted to apply to, and for that I wanted new work, something to show that I had done more than commissions of anime characters since graduation. So it was that, after breakfast each day, I climbed the ladder into the attic, where my paints and canvas were, and I set myself to making art.

Most of it was, admittedly, not very good. But that was alright—it was about discipline, building a routine and getting into the rhythm of the work. Inspiration would come when the time was right. For now, I simply had to keep working at it, putting in my hours. And so, in those dark hours of the night when I could not sleep, I painted.

When the headaches came on, I ignored them as just another side effect of insomnia. Years of pulling all-nighters for project deadlines and crashing on couches in friends’ apartments meant that I was used to brushing off aches and pains, seeing them as nothing more than minor conveniences—a sign that I had been suffering, as all good artists did, for their work. I could take a Tylenol and rest later; now, there was only the Work, taking form stroke by stroke under my brush.

Cadmium yellow, vermillion red. Mix in turpentine and a dab of black, and then apply to canvas—small, careful strokes. Stand back, assess the whole. Select the next colors, and do it all over again.

And that was what I was doing, one late night as my husband slept in our bed, when stars burst in my vision, each a white-hot explosion of pain. The paintbrush fell to the ground as I bent over, hissing between my teeth as I pressed my hands against my head—but it was too late, the dizziness rising until it drowned everything out.

When I came to, I was lying on the floor of the attic. My husband was standing over me, dressed in fluffy slippers and cotton pajamas as he gazed down at me.

I should have figured it out then. I should have known it from the way he stood there, posture relaxed and hands in his pockets as he looked at me the way a scientist might study a pinned butterfly. I should have stood up and ran out of the house then, never looking back.

But my head still throbbed, blurring shapes and colors as I stared up at him. And when he helped me stand up, his hands were gentle, strong and steady as he tucked me into bed. And as I lay there, head still aching too much to sleep, he brought me tea, sweetened just the way I liked, and asked if I had been sleeping well, taking breaks for water and food? Only he knew how creative types could get, and he wanted to make sure I was taking care of myself.

I shook my head. The insomnia could be a factor, but I knew my body, and this did not feel like sleep deprivation alone. This was something different, something new.

The handyman came the next day to inspect the house. As I laid in bed, he explained that he’d found a carbon monoxide leak in the kitchen—but just a small one, not severe enough to be actively life-threatening. Over time and with the effects compounded, however, it would explain my symptoms. He would return tomorrow to replace the gas lines for the oven and stove, and that should resolve the problem.

My husband thanked the man, and then turned to me. And he was so proud, so satisfied at solving this mystery, that despite everything, I could not help but smile in return.

---

There is not much to do when you are dying. Standing aches, as does sitting, and trying to focus on a page or a screen sends a spike of pain through my skull. My husband kindly keeps my phone tuned in to the local radio station, so that I can be kept informed about sports scores and weather reports from my confinement in the guest bedroom. Most of the time, I tune it out, too busy thinking over the last few months and trying to find the moment it all went wrong. Was it after I fainted from carbon monoxide, when I could no longer deny that living here was making me sick? Or should I have left after the pipes, the dark water a sign to leave and never come back? When he walked through the door of the dive bar like a dream too good to be true, should I have seen what he was then?

If I had stayed at home for college, listened to my mother and chosen a degree in something safe like engineering or accounting. If I hadn’t been so damn stubborn, determined to do things my way in spite of common sense or other people’s opinions. It always has to be difficult with you, my mother said, in one of our last conversations. Now, unable to sit up without a rush of pain, I find myself finally agreeing with her.

My husband’s youngest bride strokes my hair. Even after the others leave to wander the halls with whatever ghostly business they have left, she stays with me—fixing the blankets as best she can, laying a cool hand against my burning forehead.

She sings for me, sometimes. She had been a musician when she was alive, a virtuoso violinist and a talented soprano. A voice like a bird, everyone said, and when she drew her bow across her strings, each note sang out clear and true. Her parents took pride in her, their only child with golden curls and sea blue eyes, and they brought their songbird to the parlors of well-off musicians and politicians.

But a songbird must have a cage to live in, someone to feed and care for her after her parents could not. And while music was an acceptable diversion for a young girl, there was no question of her taking it up as a profession. A girl from a different class might take to the opera and work for her living, but not their daughter, with her delicate hands and soft skin.

They were well-off, her parents, and she was pretty enough that plenty of suitors came to their parlor, pledging love and unending devotion. The majority her parents turned away as too old or too poor, and most accepted their rejection graciously. There were plenty of beautiful young women to be wooed and no point in spending so much time on one unobtainable prize.

One, however, kept returning.

He was an odd man, the last of her suitors. Handsome enough to please any young girl, and wealthy enough to satisfy her parents as well. And yet no one knew much of him—where he came from, what family he was from, or how he had acquired his money. Her parents were uncertain about him at first, this stranger appearing as if out of thin air like a character from a fairy story. But he brought their daughter presents each visit, opened doors and held umbrellas for her, and so slowly, gradually, he charmed them as well.

So you see, my ghost whispers, her voice sweet and clear as a bell, it would not have helped. I listened to my mother, and I am here as well.

---

I fell sick that winter. It wasn’t major—just a small, ordinary cold, but one which lingered in the form of sniffling and a persistent cough.

The residency in Colorado emailed me back—unfortunately at this time…a strong pool of applicants…encourage you to apply again next year. It was not a surprising response, but it still stung. I had foolishly let myself hope, building an imaginary future out of what-ifs. It was alright; I had been disappointed before, and I would be disappointed again. It was part of the process.

It was hard, though, not to let it get to me. Ever since I had fainted in the attic, I’d been struggling through even everyday tasks. Washing the dishes took twice as long, and things kept vanishing from where I remembered them or turning up where I least expected. Drawers stuck; the toaster barely browned my bread, and the espresso machine—the one that cost a month of my rent in the city—seemed incapable of producing anything more than coffee-flavored water. One day, I opened the cabinet above the fridge, and a set of plates fell, one by one crashing to the ground as I watched in frozen horror. It was like the house was rebelling against me, telling me with each rattling windowsill that I wasn’t wanted here, wasn’t welcome. And why would I be? I was an intruder, an unwanted guest who had only come into rooms here by lucky accident, a gold digger whose hands did not own any of the things she touched.

When I dreamed, it was of blood and endless halls. Ghostly hands reaching for me, cold fingers brushing over my skin. Go go go go go

this place is not meant for you.

But this was my house. After years of instant ramen and shopping at thrift stores, of wearing coats in my apartment to save on heating and working holidays for the bonus pay, it was mine—a room of my own, a place where I could paint the walls without needing to ask for permission. Mine mine mine at long last, and no passing wraith would take that from me.

---

In December, a month or two after the carbon monoxide incident, my husband flew out of the country on another of his indeterminable business trips.

With the wind outside bitterly cold and the closest neighbors miles away, I began wandering the house, a blanket wrapped around my shoulders as I coughed and sniffled. In the early hours of the morning, it was easy to make it into an adventure, to imagine myself Indiana Jones or some other intrepid explorer mapping out a new land. I found an old Walkman cassette player in a drawer, and two first edition Hemingway novels hiding next to Tom Clancy and Stephen King in the library. There were small pieces of my husband’s life scattered throughout the house, and I followed them like a trail of breadcrumbs leading who-knows-where.

It was on one of those nights, trailing my fingers over the peeling fleur-de-lis wallpaper, that I found myself wandering towards my husband’s study. It was, technically, not a room forbidden to me, though I rarely entered it all the same. On the occasions when he worked from home, my husband did not like to be disturbed. If I came to bring him tea or a letter from the mail, he always asked that I leave it outside, on the small side table in the hall. I had been inside the room once or twice, and it had been a room like any other: a large mahogany desk with a plush upholstered chair for its occupant, blue-and-white Chinese vases in the corners, and a bookshelf full of heavy tomes on law and history pushed against one wall.

But there was a door next to his study now, one that had appeared there seemingly overnight. Painted bright blue with an ornate golden doorknob, it stood next to the door to his study: the same size and shape, opening to some secret place I had never known of before.

I reached out, half expecting my fingers to swipe through air. But the doorknob was cold and solid, and it turned the same as any other.

At first, I thought it was simply a storage room. It certainly looked like one: a small, cramped space, cluttered with antique lamps and old furniture. A violin case sat on an overstuffed armchair, a thick layer of dust over both; yellowed books laid on a nightstand, too far away for me to make out their titles. A pile of props sat in the corner, faded Venetian masks and feathered hats hanging from the tips of fake swords.

And there, in every painting and photograph hung on the walls, was my husband: dressed in frockcoat and cravat, bowtie and trilby and sleek tuxedo, but undeniably him. The same sharp cut of his jaw, the bright eyes. Smiling out of a black-and-white daguerreotype, standing with his arm around a pale blonde girl in an oil painting—not a single line on his face, every bit as handsome and young as the day I had met him.

A chill ran through me. Standing there, in my slippers and my nightdress with only the light of my phone to illuminate the room, I knew that these were not art pieces, some historical recreation memorialized by an artistic hand. This was my husband, tall and beautiful and unchanging through the years.

White gloves peeking out of a gilded trunk, fingertips cut off so that a wearer could play violin even in the winter. A vintage perfume atomizer on top of a dresser, still half-full. A wooden case of fountain pens, inlaid with jade and turquoise and glossy abalone shell. And on the wall, tied with ribbons and pinned in place beneath glass like insect on a corkboard, three locks of hair: black the color of night, red the color of burnished fire, and blonde the color of fresh-spun gold.

Slowly, as if in a dream, I ran a trembling hand through my own hair. A muddy brown color I had never thought extraordinary, but perhaps that didn’t matter, not when the goal was a complete set.

The hand that held my phone flashlight was shaking, making the shadows elongate and sway along the walls. The headache and the dizziness were back again, the world blurring in and out of focus as I placed my other hand on the wall, trying to steady myself as I stepped back—

And hit something solid, something warm.

“Dearest,” my husband said, his voice mild. He was dressed in a suit, and the smell of travel lingered on his clothes—sweat, faded cologne, disinfectant and stale coffee. “It’s late. What are you doing out of bed?”

I stared at him. My husband was a large, broad-shouldered man, but it was not until this moment that I truly felt the difference in strength between us. “I—”

“Come now,” my husband said, hand wrapping around my arm, “let’s get you to bed, shouldn’t we?”

---

Cups of cool water and honeyed tea. Soup, spooned patiently into my mouth even as it spilled and dribbled over the bedsheets. Dayquil, Nyquil, Tylenol, vitamin C, a half-dozen pills I could not identify but swallowed anyways. What else was there to do? He would not let me use my phone, concerned that the screen would aggravate my headache, and without it, I had no other way to contact my friends. My parents were dead, and all my remaining relatives lived states away—no one would come riding in to rescue me, no avenging brother or worried mother breaking down the doors of this house that had become my tomb. Even if I had been well, the cars and bank accounts were in his name, and he had always been stronger than me.

No, better to end this with whatever dignity I could. I’d fallen for his smiles and pretty promises, another fool in a long line of foolish girls. The only thing to do now was to smile and play my part as the story reached its end. In the grand scheme of things, it was alright. I was a decent painter, but my death would not rob the world of some generational genius, a Michelangelo or Van Gogh whose brilliance would have resonated through the ages. The world would spin on, just as it always did.

And it was then, as the world blurred with fever and I resigned myself to death, that my ghosts appeared.

---

And they are here with me now, my ghosts. They cannot help me stand, but they can see, and they whisper the house’s secrets to me: the fraying wires in the living room and the tangled cables in the study, the old furniture stacked in the basement like kindling. Pooling together their ghostly strength, they bring me things: a lighter dropped beneath the sofa, a half-full box of matches, the batteries from the new smoke detectors.

In the attic, in the space that he had promised would only be mine, paints and solvents spill onto the ground, linseed oil and turpentine drying on old wood.

These days, my husband comes home at seven, sometimes eight. He goes to bed late, but he sleeps deeply, the sleep of a man who does not fear hunger or violence, who has never had to skip meals to make rent or walk through streets with a canister of pepper spray clutched tight.

He likes a glass of wine before bed, my husband. Red, usually a Cabernet Sauvignon or a Pinot Noir, which he sips while reading a book or newspaper. It would be a moment’s work for ghostly hands to uncap a sleeping pill and stir the powder into his glass. If his drink is a little bitterer as a result, he will not think much of it, chalking it up to higher tannin content if anything. There would be no reason for him, in his own house with only a bedbound wife for company, to suspect anything else.

And while he sleeps, my ghosts will work—snipping wires and lighting candles, knocking over cartons of cooking oil and loosening gas valves in the kitchen. The renovations have brushed the cobwebs out of the corners and papered over the cracks, but it is still an old, old house, its beams and rafters so much waiting tinder.

The girl with one eye laughs as she drifts through the walls, a wild, giddy cackle. Once upon a time, she watched as my husband fled the burning house where her cooling corpse laid. Now, at last, he is coming to join her.

I will not make it out of this house alive. But, with my ghosts watching over me, neither will he.

---

Host Commentary

She keeps blaming herself. That’s what struck me the most. She keeps putting herself down: she’s not that pretty, she’s too stubborn, she’s not that good of an artist.  She didn’t see that Prince Charming had a blue beard. Most of this I think we all get. We all get down on our looks, we regret the choices we make, we don’t think our talents are good enough.  It’s bad and we shouldn’t do it, but it’s relatable.

It’s faulting herself for falling for Bluebeard (I’m going to call him Bluebeard) that drives me nuts. Women have to set up defenses for pick up artists, groomers, and fuck boys. How do you prepare for a centuries old serial killer? Someone who has taken weeks or months to create the perfect meetcute, the perfect first date, the perfect marriage proposal? A being that seems to have almost Lestat levels of supernatural charm, good looks and money? And he got her a house. In this economy.

Already weakened by society and “illness”, when she discovers the truth, she can’t resist just being put back to bed. She is forced into the role our auteur has made for her.  The tragic young sickly bride, cut in her prime, so much potential with her talent now lost.  Bluebeard has a role too, the selfless caregiver fulfilling those marriage vows and soon grieving widower. A role he will play to perfection since he’s done it so often.  However, there is a committee of interested parties who look upon the auteur and have some notes.

There is a role for the bride to play, not as a victim, but as a witness.  She hears the ghosts’ stories, how this man has been running this play for decades, maybe centuries. Not the exact text since you have a new actress every time but the structure never changes. It’s a story of a serial killer who has many victims and doesn’t get caught.  The problem is Bluebeard, our auteur, thinks this story can be repeated again and again. That’s not how stories work, they need an ending. So despite the auteur’s wishes, this committee has decided this needs a fiery finale and our bride has a perfect seat to watch it all burn.