![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/11\/harlow-banner.png\")
<\/p>\nBy Albe Harlow.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The house was bolted up. But this difficulty could be elaborated. For the back mudroom, specifically\u2014it was locked. The angular cellar entrance, locked. Every gleaming facet of the New England interior, with fist-tight niches, locked. The antique Volvo in the drive, locked. The charcoal grille, sitting like the tubby inkwell that writes summer suppers, locked. The garage, its vanilla fragrance of degraded concrete and auto fluids, locked. The slim, creaking garden door through the wooden threshold of which children often yanked a rubber hose\u2014it, too, albeit tenuously, was locked. From hedgerow to cornice, the house was plainly and utterly locked.<\/p>\n
This being altogether true and indisputable, if one were to find oneself inside the mudroom, finding it opening into a brief hall that stretches between den and kitchen, if one were somehow to have wiggled the latch and attained entry to that vestibular glass box leading to such a hall, he would find yet another door in his way, an intermediating backdoor, the next door, and, predictably, it too would be quite locked\u2014recognizably bolt-locked, in fact. All the same, should one, having attained access to the mudroom and situated between two doors, happened to have managed, as by a wishful gesture of the hands, to suppress the lock, to unscrew it out of its restricting position…<\/p>\n
The hinge would creak mightily, of course. The walls and windows, floors and ceilings, would shudder in quantal surprise: another chance… a recapitulation. Should one thereby have taken what is the next step, striding beyond the threshold\u2019s metal armature, silently moving from the aforementioned hall into the kitchen, where a wise but still-young couple once sat, handling their finances, daily acknowledging it had been nearly ten years since the Allies won the War\u2014if one were to find oneself in this space, one would open the pantry cabinets and find\u2014what would he find? Would the pantry be locked? Could this be?\u2014that the pantry would be locked? One should say not. Rather the pantry would be empty\u2014grossly and irrefragably empty. Over the island, however, would be a hanging forest of pots, skillets and sauciers, a metal fry screen. How peculiar that they should remain guarding the kitchen, anticipating a scent.<\/p>\n
Having gained entry to what is the ground-floor of the house, being chastened by the bedimmed state of things, one would move to the dining room and sit, quiet as wool against wood, in the rhapsode\u2019s seat, where awed silences once reinforced the husband\u2019s Homeric reprisal against the blob of lived experience. Yes, the glass cupboard of china would be locked, most probably. Candles would point flamelessly toward the ceiling. Would there be an old circular burn mark upon the pattern of the rug, consequent of a mishandled charger? Yes, perhaps, faintly, nestled beside the undular scrunch of a cabriole foot. The chair\u2019s joinery would still be slowly unlocking, wanting more and more in fixity and surety. The chair would dilate here, between the arms, welcoming one\u2019s return to repose. Of course one did not typically suppress story-chanting while seated in this chair. Yet, in the old locked home, one would breathe smartly. Above the microsonica of screws and wood whinging in boards, there would emerge a few ambient whispers. These audible movements would emanate from the walls, possible sounds with which one might embroider nameless significances of memory. This is all to ask, having entered the locked house, having passed from the mudroom, through the hall, around the kitchen, into the dining room, how might one flesh those holes in the air? For here had been life heaped upon life. All these withered petals of utterance\u2014these memories brush the eyelashes, hook the nose, cause the spine to twirl. From the story chair at the head of the dining room table, one ascertains the following sequence: Move on<\/em>, move on<\/em>, move on<\/em>, move on<\/em>. One would withdraw from the chair.<\/p>\n The dining room\u2014giving way as it does to the foyer with its rough-hewn teal-grey floor tiles, its powder room, its staircase\u2014is routed to the stately contours of the mid-sized living room. The cool foyer tile would throb, fascinated by the arch of a foot. Abutting the front door, the upside-down word, Welcome<\/em>. The living room, sunken by a step, gives no indication of the society that would have been its former radiance, people from the Naval-world-over, talking of new neighbors, television, Atoms for Peace, Korea, an Interstate Highway, the bends in Mill River that still yielded rainbow trout. The Steinway & Sons grand piano would gleam its tempered black licorice from the far corner, the inaudible echo of E-D#<\/em> playing soundlessly but tensely into those words from the dining room.<\/p>\n Sitting on the piano bench, one would glimpse the kitchen through the central passage, adjacent double wooden doors leading three steps down to the leathery den, a place for watching\u2014through the windowpane\u2014rain leap atop ivy, atop hydrangea leaves, droplets juggled by boxwoods whose green density led, hedge by hedgerow, to a privet archway on the other side of the house. But that is outdoors, where an entire structure may be captured and pocketed like a Monopoly piece. Out there is a far safer place, a place further from the past; it is furnished by maps and signs and ETAs and neighborhoods, a realm of entropic desolation, of virtuality, of markets. Indoors, past the ledgers and joists, atop the cinder foundation, under the roof\u2019s binders and ties, within the quite-locked house\u2014this is where seasons rend before the loom. Cycles are broken and remade here. And yet, given the circumstances, one could not be said to have been invited in. There would be no definite welcome across these familiar spaces. The typical zones would keep dormant and without the glow of human fidgeting. The fireplace beside which the Monopoly and Candy boardgames were set would be fossilized into the northeast wall of the house. The red silken walnut-lined Louis XV sofa would… \u2014there it would be, its seat as sturdy and impenetrable as a dollar bill. Recall the piano\u2019s notes: Move on<\/em>, move on<\/em>, move<\/em>.<\/p>\n Room by room, in the course of such drifting, a return to the foyer would be inevitable. Step by wheezy rebuff, one would ascend the clever staircase to the second floor. After sneaking around the upstairs hall, trying each bedroom door and finding each of them locked, one would pause to consult the cracks in this edifice: the locked house. Was it possible to locate the first moments of doubt, to feel the draftiness of that chasm waiting behind every holiday party? Might it have been possible to catch the first wrinkle of despair, of what can be found all over the locked house but also in most every house? The hardscrabble fix of history, of unreconciled human trajectories, would be everywhere evident in the locked house, across various cyphers and domestic composites. What about the homey lore earned through, as it turns out, contemptible means? Did the post-industrial family have a chance?\u2014were its members ever touched by what Eliot could not face, by anagnorisis? Appropriate sentences would have stained the tablecloth, retoned the piano strings. Might it have been possible to collect those incipient weavings of rebellion, where the epic of youth met with a physic of mortality? What would America be if not a puzzling memory, an inaccessible childhood?\u2014a constant dying of phantom parents, grandparents. Admitting this much, the master bedroom door would swing open…<\/p>\n The master bedroom door would swing open and one would touch the lace and linens of the austere but somehow dainty marriage bed; one would sniff the boozy perfumes on the vanity, and cross over to the other rooms, their doors blankly open. How prosaic, the open door\u2014marking the tidy but ancient quandary over movement, over being here or being there. The walls, floors, wallpaper, molding, banister of the house seemed to be oscillating, dancing between several eternally-inerasable stations.<\/p>\n One stands at the threshold of the third room and regards the faceless figure of a child. One is confronted by his slumped back; the child espies something through the window. He is looking through the red maple branches onto the lawn and down onto the lawn through the red maple branches and through the red maple branches onto the lawn\u2014<\/p>\n The child was holding vigil over the house. One ought not speak to the child: one has trespassed beyond locked doors. An intruder: the child would scream after death.<\/p>\n \u201cI know you\u2019re here,\u201d said the child to his invisible friend.<\/p>\n How does one reply without setting siege to a child\u2019s mind?<\/p>\n All the house was astir. The glass panes fluttered wildly, tympani through which the child continued to pass his gaze.<\/p>\n \u201cFor whatever reason,\u201d I started, coursing out my phlegmy voice, \u201cfor whatever reason have you locked the house? It has taken me years to trick the mudroom door.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYou could have broken it. You could have broken in.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI didn\u2019t want to damage anything,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n \u201cNothing has been done yet, Mom says. Mom and Dad have lots of work always for me in the yard too.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYes,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n \u201cI played F\u00fcr Elise<\/em> today twenty times and didn\u2019t even finish my orange juice. It is in the sink.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cFor whatever reason do you stay upstairs in your room like this?\u201d I said. \u201cI had not expected to find you up in your room like this, so deep up here in the house.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhen did you learn to drive the Volvo?\u201d said the child, ignoring my question.<\/p>\n \u201cFourteen-and-a-half-years-old,\u201d I said. \u201cYou shouldn\u2019t sit in your room like this all day. Where are your books?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYesterday,\u201d said the child, \u201cMrs. B taught us about memory. She said memory is a place we walk through every day. But we don\u2019t know we\u2019re there. Mrs. B says we can\u2019t see memory or hear it either.\u201d After a ripple in the air, the child gave: \u201cDo you remember things?\u201d<\/p>\n All heed, all bearing, was now whipping with the wind of good Mrs. B\u2019s lecture. And what a lecture it must have been.<\/p>\n I stood, lingering at the threshold. \u201cHave Mom and Dad left for Sens yet? Have they left for France, for Europe? On business. Have they left?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cFor Sens,\u201d the child repeated, listless, staring down onto the lawn through the red maple branches.<\/p>\n \u201cHave they left yet?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cMom and Dad are always leaving. Coming and going, leaving, getting here.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYes,\u201d I said. \u201cBut have they left and… Has anything ever happened?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cMrs. B says the future is made of the past.\u201d<\/p>\n I drooped against the almond-smelling wood trim of the door jamb. \u201cDoes she?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYes. But some<\/em> things, she says…\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cShe says what?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cShe says some<\/em> things are beyond reckoning<\/em>.\u201d He shrugged, still facing the window. \u201cI\u2019m not sure about it. I\u2019m very hungry.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cDoes she?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cShe says some things get trapped, like inside of the stories. She says we give stories to ourselves. And no one ever finds them out.\u201d<\/p>\n The nearby storage closet was ajar. Groaning it open, I found the old greened-leather dictionary. This and several other books I placed on the shivering plane of the twin bed.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve put these books here for you. Start with these. And move on from there.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYou should go,\u201d said the child. \u201cNo one is supposed to come inside while my Mom and Dad are not home. I\u2019ve bolted our doors.\u201d<\/p>\n The child tried to collect himself in the whipping glass of his bedroom window, still staring down onto the lawn through the red.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n One would be keen to make his exit. Having left, outside amidst the dewy bundles of hydrangeas, one would hear a small second-story voice: \u201cI am not even here.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n ABOUT THE AUTHOR The house was bolted up. But this difficulty could be elaborated. For the back mudroom, specifically\u2014it was locked. The angular cellar entrance, locked. Every gleaming facet of the New England interior, with fist-tight niches, locked. The antique Volvo in the drive, locked. The charcoal grille, sitting like the tubby inkwell that writes summer suppers, locked. The garage, its vanilla fragrance of degraded concrete and auto fluids, locked. The slim, creaking garden door through the wooden threshold of which children often yanked a rubber hose\u2014it, too, albeit tenuously, was locked. From hedgerow to cornice, the house was plainly and utterly locked.<\/p>\n A short story by Albe Harlow<\/b>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44448,"featured_media":118105,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-118104","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118104","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44448"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=118104"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118104\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":118106,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118104\/revisions\/118106"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/118105"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=118104"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=118104"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=118104"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/10\/harlow.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
\n<\/strong>Albe Harlow<\/strong>\u2019s stories, essays, and poems have appeared in the The Hopkins Review<\/i>,\u00a0Cleveland Review of Books<\/i>,\u00a0Cambridge Literary Review<\/i>,\u00a03:AM Magazine<\/i>, Bellingham<\/i> Review<\/i>, Princeton University\u2019s Inventory<\/i>, Contrary Magazine<\/i>, RHINO<\/i>,\u00a0La Piccioletta Barca<\/i>, and elsewhere. Another story is slated for publication within Gavialidae<\/i> in 2025. His project relating to the auditory legacy of Jacques Derrida, publicized by Cornell University Library, is ongoing. He is a 2019 graduate of Columbia University\u2019s MFA Writing Program and was a longtime reader at Harvard Review<\/i>. He attended the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University for the 2021 Summer Session. He is querying a novel while writing a new one from his home in New York City.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"