The Plains Farmhouse That Waited
On the edge of the plains, where grass stretches to the horizon like a green sea, a farmhouse sits with the air of a patient observer. The boards are weathered, the paint thin as a sigh, and the windows seem to watch the traveler approach on dusty tires. Locals say the house waited there before the first tractors clanked to life, and that it will keep waiting long after the fields have forgotten the name of the last tenant.
I drove up the gravel road and felt the wind fold around the frame, a sound like hollow laughter curling from the walls. The door, when I touched it, yielded with a reluctance of a tired creature. Inside, the air tasted of preserved rain and old wood. A clock hung on the wall, its hands bent backward, ticking—though no obvious motion, just a whispering rhythm that never quite matched my breath. The rooms spread like pockets of memory, and from the kitchen came the faintest whisper of dishes clinking and a kettle forever inching toward boiling.
Night pressed the grasses flat and the house began to listen. The floorboards murmured a language I half remembered from childhood, a dialect of creaks and sighs that coaxed a shiver from my spine. A child’s laughter, distant but intimate, echoed somewhere above me, as though a family huddled behind a closed door and pretended I was not there. The house did not need to speak; it waited. It waited for a story to end, for a traveler to become part of the walls.
“We wait,” the house seemed to say, “for the thing that walks between the margins of the plains and the quiet places between nights.”
- Doors that never quite close, sealing you inside with your own breath
- Windows that frame a horizon you cannot reach, no matter how you press your face to the glass
- Chairs that rotate slowly, as though someone unseen is finishing conversations you never started
- Footsteps that meet you on the stairs even when no one else stands beneath the ceiling
By dawn the farmhouse wore a thin, pale smile, opened a single square of light on the floor, and offered me a chair. I sat, listening to the wind, and realized the plains had not claimed me so much as adopted me as part of its slow, patient history. When I stepped outside, the door closed with a sigh that sounded like a name I hadn’t learned, and the house resumed its waiting, the quiet sentinel of the plains, the memory of anyone who ever believed rooms could keep a promise.