It remembers every creak on the stairs,
she says, pronouncing it crick, and
he nods, amiable, alarmed.
Always he stands there, she points:
and obediently he waits for it
to vanish, disperse into the now foreign quiet.
She pauses herself,
her still pointing finger sinking, slowly, expecting.
He feels a tug then, of something, at something –
not in his body (fluttering
of the heart, churning gut, clenched chest)
but in some other long lost region,
barely retrievable in that other tongue.
This spook now rummaging
in his boy’s memory bank
evidently – without asking consent; a snatcher
of old keys, a strangler of consequences.
He battles his way to disbelief, ignores the pain,
the poking about in a haze of no-recollection.
Come now, he says at last and pleads her
away, on to the final grating
sound of the lock. Neither of them looking
as something stays behind.