Heather Frankland
The Yellow House
You joke to friends about the ugly yellow house on the corner of your street—a yellow so bright that it is trying too hard to be cheerful like a person who smiles so wide, trying to distract you from their eyes, flat without mirth.
You remember this house having various occupants: the neighborhood girl whose skin was dirty and frequently stole things, so the other parents wouldn’t let her into their houses, even on hot days when she and their children were clinging to the shadows and fantasizing about ice-cold Kool-Aid—a cherry, so red it’d stain their mouths; the Thai bride and her military husband—she of the ever-green thumb, a garden rich with tomatoes, especially the yellow pear ones that didn’t grow well in your soil. She told you to call her Tim because it was easier to pronounce. In the summers when you would knock on her door, exchanging tomatoes and chitchat, you would look behind that open door into the darkness where her husband lived—ever-tall, a shadow with teeth, and you tried to visit her when he wasn’t there but he was often there. He never shared his name.
And then the first occupants, you barely remember the sirens while you stood across the street in your other neighbors’ driveway, the ones who watched you when you were little, and your mother went back to school to finish her education. Barb, your neighbor’s voice, tells a story you think you remember—saying that a man killed himself in that house, in the back bedroom of the two-bedroom house—the one by the pine bushes where the neighborhood cats gather and fight—that bedroom, you swear you heard it—the loud sound—and the dark house started its course. No matter how bright the current owners paint it or how many winter decorations they hang—this house will always be dark to you.
Note: This piece originally appeared at Every Pigeon in 2019.
Heather Frankland is the Poet Laureate of Silver City and Grant County. She holds a Master of Fine Arts in poetry and a Master of Public Health from New Mexico State University, and she was a Peace Corps and Peace Corps Response Volunteer in Peru and Panama. Originally from Indiana, she lives in Silver City where she teaches English at WNMU. Her poetry chapbook, Midwest Musings, was published in Fall 2023 by Finishing Line Press.
