Title: Blueprints
Genre: Fantasy
Word Count: 500 words.
Notes: You can find more of my published fiction, as well as free fiction, here.
The house was never meant to be a trick. It was designed with precision—a thing of measurements and certainty, its angles sharp as a scalpel, its symmetry a matter of control, as beautiful as poetry.
The architects were meticulous. This would be their masterpiece. Every corridor aligned, every window placed for perfect light, every wall set at a faultless ninety-degree angle. The plans were followed without deviation.
And yet, the house refused to stay as it was built.
It began with the doors. One led to the parlour in the morning and to the attic by night. A locked study could be opened from the outside but not the inside. Some doors did not lead anywhere at all.
Then the halls stretched, yawning into darkness. The wood grain swirled gently; the wallpaper bloomed with florals one day, sober geometric shapes the next. The front stair twisted mid-step, spilling those who climbed it into rooms they had never entered before. A window that should have overlooked the garden opened to brick.
The architects returned, at first with quiet curiosity, then with frantic hands. They carried their blueprints through the fickle corridors, held them up to the walls, tried to map what had come undone.
But the blueprints changed, too.
Lines erased themselves. Dimensions blurred. The paper softened, curling at the edges like withered petals, until one by one, they vanished.
The architects searched the house, pulled up floorboards, emptied cupboards, but the blueprints were gone.
Not misplaced. Gone. Folded into some nook of the house that hadn’t been there before.
Now, the last of the architects stands somewhere in the house’s belly, lost, nameless. The others are gone—not dead, just missing, lost to a house that no longer remembers its own rooms.
Something shifts beneath the floor. The ceiling warps like soft wax, bending, pulling downward. The air is close and heavy, choked with the pressure of too many cramped rooms.
A door swings open—a door that wasn’t there a moment ago. The architect peers through.
And there, for the first time, is the heart of the house.
Not a room, not even a place, but something raw, unfinished—a blueprint that has been redrawn too many times, its lines bleeding into one another, its form collapsing under its own revisions.
And in the centre of it all, the lost architects stand in rows, still and waiting, their skin like old vellum, inked in the blue lines of plans that will never be built.
There is a space between them—narrow, waiting, perfectly measured. Just enough room for one more.
The architect takes a step back. Another. But the walls inhale, pulling them forward, pressing them into that empty space.
Limbs flatten, spine softens. The ink soaks into their skin, deep, permanent, the lines of their body thinning into something crisp and white.
A final blueprint.
The house closes its doors.
It never needed architects. It only needed time.
Comments