Strength From Stubborness

By Peter Bowden

The house had no door, only the suggestion of one—shadowed wood and a dark mouth that opened to memory and dust. The tin roof, rusted like dried blood, caught the morning sun and threw it back in brittle shards. The field behind it stretched quiet and pale, harvested and bare, as if it too had given everything it had to give.

He used to come here with his grandfather, when the place still smelled of woodsmoke and sorghum syrup. The porch had held up their boots, the floor creaked beneath Sunday storytelling, and the walls knew the names of every cousin born within arm’s reach of the stove. That was long ago. The trees now stood leafless and thin, like bones reaching for a sky that no longer listened.

Still, the house endured. Not from strength, but from stubbornness—refusing to fall, refusing to forget. He stood in its shadow, not looking in, not daring to step close, as if the house might speak and say his name. Some places, he thought, don’t die. They just wait.

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