Next Door Dies Tonight
By Sobowale Oluwadarasimi
They say home is where the heart is. But I think this one left its heart behind long ago, and it took something colder with it.
And no, I don’t mean this metaphorically. Not like packing up memories and finding new walls to lean grief against. No. This house moved. On its own. And it did so while I slept.
Every morning, there was a new postcode, and every night, a stranger bled into the walls.
Now, this whole thing started on a Wednesday. And on this day, I woke to birds I didn’t recognize and to a sun that poured in from the wrong side of the window. Outside my gate, there was a little boy in a school uniform tying his shoelace. He looked up, confused, as though he had never seen this house before.
The house had moved. Yes, the house itself had moved.
It had the same chipped blue shutters, the same cracked doorknob, same hall mirror that tilted like it never forgave gravity.
But the view had changed. And it would keep changing.
I inherited it from my mother’s sister, Aunt Rina, who no one talked about after 1997. The will said: “The house will know what to do. Just let it.”
At first, I thought it was a joke or metaphor, or maybe one of those riddles that the elderly wrap around their trauma.
Until the second morning. And the third. And the thirteenth.
It moved to different cities, and different streets. Now, the plumbing always worked, but the Wi-Fi never did. I tried tracking it, logging each town, each GPS point. But the signal scrambled each time I slept. I’d wake to unfamiliar sky, and something else:
A name and a face on the news. A body found. Always someone local. Always within a mile. Always dead by dawn.
Now, when such peculiar things happen to you with a pattern after a long while, you stop being surprised.
Because these people that were announced to be dead weren’t just regular strangers. They were people the house passed by. The first was the flower vendor who smiled as I walked past. And next was the man at the train station who offered me directions. And then finally, a child who waved.
The house was marking them. And I was the only witness it ever kept.
By month two, I stopped unpacking.
I began to sleep with one eye open, not out of fear for myself, but out of fear for them. The ones who didn’t know they’d been seen. That my windows had watched them. That my floorboards had hummed when they passed.
I even tried leaving, and slept in a hotel once, just to test it.
When I came back the next day, the house had moved without me.
And when I finally found it again, it was parked on a quiet street in a coastal town, and it was locked. But there were shoes at the door.
And the shoes were mine. And beside it was a note that read: “You’re late. They’re already gone.”
So I began to keep a journal.
I wrote names, descriptions, smiles and even voices. In my big blue jotter, I wrote:
“Woman at bakery, curly red hair, offered me a free croissant.”
“Teenage boy in a yellow hoodie: stopped his friends from kicking a stray dog.”
And I prayed, stupidly, desperately, that writing them down might save them. That the house would see me caring and find mercy.
But you see, mercy isn’t real estate. Mercy doesn’t knock on your door in new towns.
And still, every morning, it was the same wallpaper, the same old kettle, a new postcode, and a new name on the news.
Last week, I met someone who made the world go quiet.
She fixed my collar at a streetlight, and she laughed in a way that convinced you that her throat remembered music. She told me I looked tired, but she said it in a kind way, just like the way someone asks you “what are you carrying?” without actually saying the words.
And that night, the house groaned.
The pipes knocked, the mirrors fogged, and the floors creaked in threes.
So I didn’t sleep. I sat with my back pressed to the wood at the front door, and I whispered into the keyhole:
“Please. Not her. I’ll stay. I won’t move again. Please.”
And so, morning came, and I realized that at some point in the middle of the night, I had fallen asleep. Because when I opened my eyes, it opened to the same street, in the same city. And for once, there were no name on the news.
But later that day, I passed a different house. A house with blue shutters. A house just like mine.
Inside, someone was watching me through the curtains.
And I understood.
The house had found another passenger. It was my turn for my name to take its place on the news.
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