The physician arrived with a case of corked jars and the practiced tenderness of a man accustomed to being thanked for removing things nobody else could see. The young wife had been fainting since moving into the house. Each episode began in the drawing room with a tightening at her throat, a grayness around the mouth, and the sensation that someone else was breathing through her.
During the next fit, the physician uncorked a jar and held it near her lips. A thin gray vapor uncoiled from her mouth and entered the glass. It fogged the inside, pressed a small handprint against the surface, and settled. When the wife opened her eyes, she said she felt lighter.
The physician explained that houses of sufficient age accumulated what families refused to acknowledge. Anger soaked into wallpaper. Grief collected behind plaster. Fear settled beneath floorboards. Women tended to absorb it because they spent more time in the rooms where everyone else deposited what could not be spoken. The fainting was merely the body attempting to vent.
By evening, six jars stood on the mantel. Inside them moved fragments that did not belong to the young wife: a woman sobbing beside a cold fireplace, a girl hiding letters beneath a mattress, an old face staring through glass while someone downstairs shouted. The husband asked whether the vapors could simply be taken away.
The physician said they could, but the house required a reservoir.
That had always been the arrangement.
The husband objected that his wife would not be used that way again, and the physician regarded him with genuine approval. He uncorked the largest jar.
The transfer took less than a minute.
Afterward, the wife found her husband sitting upright on the chaise with tears running down his face. He knew where a wedding ring had been hidden in 1894. He remembered losing a child in the upstairs bedroom in 1921. His left wrist ached from a fracture received decades before his birth, and he could describe every apology never offered in the house.
The physician packed his empty jars while the husband wept with the accumulated memory of generations of women.
The house settled around him with a sound almost like relief.
His wife opened a window.
©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys
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