The Stillness Before the Split (chapter)

The house breathed like it remembered something no one else did.

Ezra moved through the hall in socked feet, the coffee in his mug still too hot to sip. The morning light hadn’t quite reached the kitchen yet, but it pressed against the edges of the blinds—soft and gold, the kind of light that made everything look older than it was. Honest light.

He stood still for a moment, letting the quiet hold.

There were no ticking clocks in the house anymore. The hum of the fridge was steady, but faint. Somewhere in the wall behind him, near the seam, there was a noise he didn’t quite have a word for—something between a vibration and a hush. He’d lived with it for years. Most days he forgot it was there. But some mornings—like this one—it felt louder than usual. Not in sound, but in shape. Like something pressed gently outward from the inside of the drywall.

The seam ran along the far wall of his bedroom. You had to know where to look—beneath the old coat of paint, between the light switch and the corner where the baseboard didn’t quite line up. A thin vertical line, faintly raised. The skin of the house trying to forget it had once been torn.

He’d heard once that the house stood among orange groves before it was split in half, moved, and reassembled here. 

He didn’t touch the seam.

Not yet.

He took a long breath through his nose. The air smelled like dust and cooling pine from last night’s open windows. A trace of citrus clung faintly to the edges—imagined, probably. The kind of scent that belonged to a memory that wasn’t his.

He sat down at the kitchen table, mug between his palms, elbows loose. The Bible lay open beside him—not for study, just out of habit. The pages were worn at the spine, a dog-ear tucked at Psalm 27. He didn’t need to read it to remember.

The Lord is my light and my salvation—whom shall I fear?

Ezra didn’t read out loud. He just let the words rest there, quiet in the air like steam from the mug.

It had been two and a half years since he came to faith. His faith didn’t come through fire or certainty—just a slow unraveling. He didn’t preach it or have verses memorized. Just knew, in the marrow, that Someone was with him now. Had been, even when he didn’t know what to call it.

The seam in the wall hummed again.

He glanced up toward the hallway. Didn’t move.

Not fear. Not even curiosity.

Just awareness. Like his body recognized something it hadn’t named yet.

A low ache stirred near an old scar—the one from the surgery he’d had as a boy. He hadn’t thought about it in years. But this morning, it pulsed with the same quiet rhythm as the wall.

There was a framed photograph on the wall behind him. Him as a baby, in someone else’s arms. The kind of photo that marked an arrival, not a beginning. The day they brought him home. Not the day he was born.

He’d lived in this house ever since. His parents were gone now—quiet deaths, years apart. The house was his, but it still held their weight in the corners.

He remembered the dream.

The tilted living room.

The floor slanted—not dramatically, just enough that you had to work to stay upright. In the dream, he always felt it in his calves, his spine, his jaw from clenching. But his family—his parents, others—they just sat there. Laughing. Talking. Balanced somehow, or pretending to be. And he was always the one trying not to slide. Always the one who asked, Don’t you feel this?

They never answered.
Not because they couldn’t.
Because they didn’t want to talk about it.

They expected him to stay upright. To smile. To ignore the pull.

He always woke with a tightness in his chest that took a few minutes to shake.

He rubbed the back of his neck and took a sip of the coffee. Still too hot.

Outside, the sun broke through the blinds in streaks. It caught the corner of the table and lit the page of the Psalm. A word shimmered, just for a second.

Light.

Ezra exhaled slowly.

He wasn’t expecting anything today. No errands. No phone calls. No work that couldn’t wait.

But the hum hadn’t stopped.

And beneath it—somewhere deep in the belly of the house, or maybe just in him—something had shifted.

Like a breath held a little too long.

(Chapter from The Grove. Contact me if you’d like to read the whole story)