My aunt used the phrase for anything mildly uncanny: a stranger holding eye contact too long, a house changing owners three times in a year, a song appearing on the radio while she was humming it. She said it lightly, almost cheerfully, and usually rubbed both arms afterward as though encouraging the sensation to finish its work.
I inherited the expression along with her house and used it the same way for years without wondering what the words were meant to describe.
The house supplied an answer gradually. Certain rooms cooled at the same time each evening, beginning upstairs and progressing toward the kitchen. The temperature change lasted exactly fifty-three minutes. During that period the skin along my arms and neck tightened and rose in waves, sometimes moving against the direction of the draft. I blamed old windows until I said my aunt’s phrase aloud one evening in the hallway and heard it repeated from the room behind me.
The voice had her cadence. It sounded worn with age, gentle and faintly impatient, as though she had already explained something many times. For several weeks I treated the response as a haunting. I waited in the hall at the usual hour and spoke to her.
Sometimes the house answered. Sometimes only my skin reacted, the gooseflesh traveling slowly from wrist to shoulder in narrow bands. Eventually I noticed that the patterns were repeating.
I began recording them. Three raised patches followed by one smooth interval. A long ripple across both arms. Two quick bursts along the neck. The sequences changed when I asked questions. They changed again when I stopped speaking altogether.
By winter I could recognize a handful of recurring patterns, although I could not translate them. My aunt’s voice appeared less often after that, as if speech had been only a temporary accommodation.
Last night the chill arrived early. I stood in the hall with my sleeves rolled up and watched my skin rise in lines that traveled across both arms with deliberate precision. The pattern continued over my shoulders and down my back until I felt it reaching places I could not see. For nearly an hour the sensation repeated, faster each time, while the house remained completely silent.
I finally understood one sequence because it was the same one my aunt used to tap against the kitchen table whenever she was waiting for me to answer a question. The recognition brought back a memory I had misplaced for years: her telling me, shortly before she died, that houses were full of things without mouths and that a person should be grateful when one of them found another way to speak.
The message has continued all day. Every few minutes the skin along my forearms rises in the same pattern, even outside the house.
Whatever learned to communicate through her appears to have decided I am ready to carry the conversation farther.
©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys
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