House Rules

Flash fiction from the North

Feb 23, 2025

I return home and more has disappeared—snowdrifts swell against the porch, shutters torn loose and scattered in frozen heaps. A wind chime clatters against the eaves, its notes swallowed by the howl of the storm. Under the ice-slicked roof, the walls groan, wood warping, splitting. A lamp flickers behind frosted panes, a single warmth among the cold.

We shovel out the path, knees locking in the freeze, exhaling in plumes. He splits logs with steady swings, stacking what’s left of last season’s wood. The snow is too deep, the drifts too high, but as long as we can get the door open, they’ll let us bring him home. We hammer salt into ice, brace a board against the warped threshold, hoping it holds.

The old man has been away too long. He’s lost more than just time—his sight in one eye, the house he once built with steady hands, the corner booth at the diner where he used to sit and swindle coffee refills. It was a numbers game, he’d say, tilting his cup just right. They comped the tenth one. He has new things now: a scar where his hairline used to be, a way of smiling that doesn’t quite meet his eyes. They put him back together, held his ribs tight with wire. He’s a little quieter, but his voice still carries its old cardsharp cadence. That’s not what I asked, he says, when they tell him it’s time to leave.

Nobody called us until after he was conscious, after he had come to in the back of an ambulance, fingers hooked onto a stranger’s wrist. They say he skidded nearly twenty feet before the metal gave way. He does not ask why we weren’t told sooner, why the nurse’s voice had already grown tired by the time we heard the news. He does not ask if the man in the other car survived, though we tell him anyway. He listens without blinking, without shifting in his hospital bed. Is that so? is all he says.

We pull the truck around and ease him inside. His new metal parts make the ride stiff; he stays silent, watching the road blur past, the sky hanging low and colorless. When the house peeks out from the storm, its beams bent from years of cold, it sounds like his breath leaves him all at once. The stairs are a problem. We lift him between us, careful with his ribs, his hip, his hands, no longer what they were.

Inside, the wood stove coughs heat, the floorboards creak beneath old weight. He sits, hands pressed together, surveying the room. We pour coffee, set out the deck of cards, clear space at the table. He folds his fingers over the worn edges, shuffles slow. We play without speaking, without looking too long at the way his grip betrays him.

Later, when the wind finally dies, he’ll ask where the old dog is, the one that used to sleep at his feet. We won’t tell him right away. We’ll let him shuffle and deal, let him move through the motions as if the dog might round the corner at any moment. But later, much later, he will pause mid-play, glance toward the empty space near the stove, and say only, ‘Huh.’