Those Who See Away
By
Ayesha Mansoor
The hush of the house on Cedar Twist was the first thing Arthur and Eleanor Vance paid for and the final thing they genuinely claimed. It wasn't the simple nonappearance of sound; it was a thick, smooth calm that appeared to have retained commotion from some time recently it may have been born. They had exchanged the clamor of the city—the sirens, the yelling matches on the walkway underneath their flat, the tireless drone of a million lives lived sonar together—for this asylum. The house was a tall, compact Victorian, not with the Gothic threat of Slope House, but with an exhausted, drooping style, like a resigned ballet performer. Its windows were eyes that had seen too much and presently favored seeing inward.
Eleanor, a chronicler by exchange, adored the stillness. She might listen to herself think. Arthur, a composer enduring a years-long dry season of motivation, found the calm at first stunning, then… promising. It was a clear slate. They unloaded their lives into its high-ceilinged rooms, their developments quieted and aware, as if in a library or a museum.
The to begin with signature of the house was not a sound, but a direction.
It was Eleanor who took note of it. “Arthur,” she said one evening over a supper of broiled chicken, the clink of their cutlery irrationally uproarious in the feasting room. “Do you ever feel… observed? But not from anyplace. From one particular place?”
Arthur, cutting a potato, shook his head. “Can’t say that I do. Which particular place?”
She didn’t point. She never pointed. She let her fair look float towards the corner of the room where the ceiling met the two dividers. There was nothing there. No portrayal, no sconce, no imperfection in the mortar. Fair a corner.
“There,” she said, her voice scarcely a whisper. “It feels like something is there, and it’s looking absent from me.”
Arthur chuckled. “Looking absent? That’s a modern one. Ordinarily the complaint is around being gazed at.”
“No,” Eleanor demanded, her forehead wrinkled. “This is diverse. It’s the act of disregarding that feels forceful. It’s a nearness that has considered me unworthy of its consideration. It’s… significantly lonely.”
Arthur came over to the table and crushed her hand. “It’s a huge, ancient, purge house, Ellie. It’s fair for us and tidy. Our minds are filling in the blanks.”
She needed to accept him. But the feeling continued. It was an unobtrusive weight, a cold spot in the outskirts of her vision that vanished when she turned to confront it head-on. It was continuously in a corner, continuously curled up, and it was continuously, unequivocally, looking away.
A week afterward, Arthur found his motivation. He called it his “Corner Sonata.” He set up his console in the living room, specifically underneath one of the corners Eleanor had said. He played inadequate, discordant chords, songs that would climb ideally, as it were, to shred and break up into atonal whispers. He was ecstatic.
“It’s like it’s giving me the silence,” he told her, his eyes landing with a fervor she hadn’t seen in a long time. “But a molded quiet. Quiet and purposeful. It’s not a purge; it’s full of things choosing not to be heard.”
Eleanor tuned in to the frequenting, unfinished pieces. They didn’t sound like music to her. They sounded like the aural proportion of a shadow confining itself from a divider and sneaking away. They made her feel the same significant forlornness as the corners.
The house started to express itself through reflection. Eleanor, while cleaning an ancient silver hand mirror she’d found in a pantry, caught a development. In the twisted, matured surface, for a division of a moment, she didn’t see her claim confront. She saw the corner of the room behind her, and in it, a swoon, a dim smear, like ancient chalk tidy, drifting. It was molded enigmatically like an individual who had been required to stand confronting the divider. She dropped the reflector, its glass splitting over the non-image.
She didn’t tell Arthur. He was as well profound in his work as thankful to the house for opening his imagination. To complain felt like ingratitude.
The moment stage was one of mutilation. Objects started to endure from a tender, determined entropy. A straight bookshelf in Arthur’s thinking created a slight but verifiable list, causing the books to slide ceaselessly to one conclusion, as if the rack were attempting to turn itself into an incline driving into the corner. The designs on their wallpaper—a classy damask—seemed to contort and tie themselves into unused, more complex arrangements if gazed at for tooling, the twists fixing like fists.
They both saw it but talked of it in metaphors.
“The house is settling,” Arthur would say.
“It’s like it’s dreaming,” Eleanor would reply.
They were both right and both awfully wrong.
The genuine frightfulness started with the photos. Eleanor was digitizing their ancient photo collections. She checked a picture from their wedding day: the two of them cutting the cake, giggling, encompassed by companions. On the screen, the picture was culminating. But the printed duplicate she made for a modern outline was off-base. In the foreground, between the obscured figures of her close relative Maureen and a college companion, stood a tall, dark figure. Its back was to the camera. Its head was tilted, not in pity, but in a pose of strong, centered carelessness. It was looking absent from the celebration, into the dim corner of the leased hall.
Her blood went cold. She burrowed through the box of firsts. It wasn’t in the negative. It wasn’t on the advanced filter. It had, as it were, showed up in the print, making the interior of this house.
She started a wild-eyed mystery review. She republished photographs from their ancient flat, from excursions, and from family Christmases. In each single one printed on the inkjet in Arthur’s ponder, an unused figure showed up. Now and then it was little, a dim smear in the distant remove of a shoreline scene, confronting the skyline. Some of the time it was closer, in the walkway of a grocery store, looking at a rack of canned products with its back to the camera. It was never locked in. It was continuously partitioned, disconnected, and wrapped in a cocoon of purposeful disregard.
It was continuously looking away.
She stood up to Arthur that night, spreading two dozen photographs over the kitchen table. “Do you see it?” she requested, her voice trembling.
Arthur looked. He picked up a photo of them climbing in the Rockies. He squinted. “See what, Ellie? It’s us. At the Icy Mass National Stop. That was a great day.”
“Look!” she screeched, poking a finger at the edge of the trees. “There! In the woods!”
He looked once more, longer this time. His front withered. “Is that… a person?”
“It’s in all of them, Arthur! Each one I’ve printed here. It’s him. The one in the corners.”
An interesting look passed over Arthur’s face—not fear, but an unfolding, terrible understanding. “The listener,” he whispered.
“The what?”
“That’s what I call it. The nearness. In my music. It’s not a watcher. It’s an audience. But it’s not tuning in to me. It’s tuning in absent from me. It’s… composing the hush I play into.”
They stood in the murmuring quiet of their kitchen, the truth of their circumstance coiling around them. The house wasn’t frequented by a phantom that looked for them. It was plagued with a nearness that characterized itself by its outright dismissal of association. Its vitality was one of preeminent, infinite lack of concern. And it was engraving itself on them, on their belongings, and on their exceptional recollections.
Arthur’s composition changed. The cheerful notes vanished completely. His “Corner Sonata” got to be a distressing, moderate piece built around rests and maintained, rotting tones. He would play a single, moo note on the piano and hold the pedal down, sitting impeccably still as the sound blurred into nothingness, tuning in to the quiet that followedwith a riveted, devout escalation. He was chasing the audience. He was attempting to get to it.
Eleanor battled it. She bought shining, gaudy lights to expel the shadows from the corners. She played boisterous, populist music on a radio—top 40 hits, conversation, anything with the human voice locked in in ordinary association. But the house ingested it. The light appeared to dim some time recently; it came to the corners. The music sounded tinny and far off, as if broadcast from another nation a long time ago.
She found Arthur standing in his conservatory, confronting a corner. He wasn’t moving.
“Arthur?”
He didn’t turn. “It’s so much wealthier than we are,” he said, his voice full of wonder. “Our lives are so boisterous and frantic. It just… is. It doesn’t require anything. It doesn’t require us.”
“I require you!” she cried, grabbing his arm and pulling him around. His confrontation was quiet and pure. He looked at her as if she were a gently, curiously colored wall.
That was the day the quiet got to be total for Eleanor. She had misplaced him. He had been enticed by the appeal of supreme apathy.
She chose forto take off. She pressed a snack for each of them. She went to him thinking about telling him they were going right presently, this moment. He was at his console, but he wasn’t playing. He was sitting with his back to the entryway, his shoulders slumped.
“Arthur, we’re leaving.”
He didn’t respond.
She strolled around to confront him. His eyes were open, but they were settled on the corner of the room. His hands were in his lap. He was impeccably, totally still. He was breathing, but so gradually she had to observe his chest for a full minute to be sure.
“Arthur!” She shook him. His head lolled marginally, but his look remained bolted on the corner. A low, delicate moan escapedhis lips, a sound of significant satisfaction. It was the sound of letting go.
Terror, immaculate and supreme, at long last seized her. This was the frightfulness. Not a hop frightener, not a creature with claws. It was the calm, willing disintegration of a human soul into nothingness. It was the triumph of impassion over love.
She ran. She cleared him out of there. She fled the ponder, snatched her sack from the lobby, and yanked open the front door.
And stopped.
The world exterior was gone.
Not dim. Not supplanted by a void. It was simply… unfinished. The patio steps dissolved into an indistinct dark fog. The oak tree in their yard was a schematic, a portrayal of obscured lines. The sky was a level, matte sheet of off-white. It was a world without detail, without profundity, without meaning. A world that was looking away.
The house had not fairly tainted them; it had devoured their setting. There was no place to run since the place in the world they had a place to be had been eradicated by an unavoidable, delicate nothingness.
Eleanor gradually closed the entryway. The press of the hook was the last, supreme sound. She turned and leaned against the wood, sliding down to sit on the floor of the hallway.
She caught on presently. The nearness wasn’t in the house. The house was in the neighborhood. They had moved interior a substance that lived by the guideline of segregation. It didn’t despise them. It didn't indeed take note of them sufficiently to despise them. It basically was, and its nature was to unwind, to calm, and to still.
She looked down the corridor towards the living room. She may see the corner of Arthur’s conservatory from here.
A thought happened to her, calm and appalling. If you couldn’t battle it, and you couldn’t escape it, there was, as it were, one thing cleared out to do. To get it. To genuinely see what it saw.
She stood and strolled gradually down the corridor. She passed the split reflection on the divider and saw her reflection—a pale, panicked lady in a blurring world. She entered the study.
Arthur hadn’t moved. He was a landmark to inattention.
Eleanor didn’t look at him. She strolled to the center of the room. She took a profound, shivering breath. And at that point, gradually, she turned her back on her spouse. She raised her head and settled her look on the purge corner where the dividers and ceiling met.
For a long time, she saw nothing. Fair paint and mortar. She let her eyes lose focus. She calmed her intellect. She ceased attempting to tune in for something and started to tune in to the quiet itself.
And at that point, she felt it. The weight. The cold spot. The significant, gravitational forlornness. It was there. And it was looking away.
She pushed harder. She attempted to take after its look. What was so critical in that clear corner that it required such an add-up to neglect for everything else?
She poured all her will into it, into not seeing the room, into not hearing the swoon sound of Arthur’s moderate breath, into not feeling the cherish and the fear that were all that was cleared out of her.
And for a single, shattering moment, she succeeded.
She saw what it saw.
Nothing.
Absolute, culminating, wonderful Nothing. A nullity so total it felt like peace. A quiet so profound it was a melody. It was the reply to each address she had ever inquired about, and it was the disintegration of the address itself. It was the conclusion of yearning, of torment, of memory. It was the consolation of being a shake, a bit of clean, a corner in a purge room.
A little, delicate murmur got away from Eleanor’s lips. It was a sound of significant contentment.
Her hands, which had been clenched at her sides, loosened. Her shoulders dropped. The wild-eyed metronome of her heart started to moderate, to develop, to space its beats, and to encourage and advance apart.
She did not move. She did not require it. She was precisely where she was assumed to be. She was looking away.
And in the calm house on Cedar Twist, the hush was at last, flawlessly, total.
Ayesha Mansoor is a passionate Software Engineer from Pakistan, currently working remotely with an American company. With a strong background in technology, she enjoys tackling complex problems and contributing to innovative projects that make a real impact.
Alongside her technical career, Ayesha nurtures a deep love for creative writing, where she blends imagination with emotion to craft engaging and heartfelt pieces. Her favorite topics include gardening, flowers, fairy tales, and love stories, fiction, nonfiction, tech, fashion, etc. each reflecting her fascination with nature and human connection.
An avid reader and lifelong learner, Ayesha finds inspiration in stories that spark curiosity and empathy. She strives to maintain a balance between her analytical mindset and creative spirit, continuously exploring new ways to grow both professionally and personally
By
Ayesha Mansoor
The hush of the house on Cedar Twist was the first thing Arthur and Eleanor Vance paid for and the final thing they genuinely claimed. It wasn't the simple nonappearance of sound; it was a thick, smooth calm that appeared to have retained commotion from some time recently it may have been born. They had exchanged the clamor of the city—the sirens, the yelling matches on the walkway underneath their flat, the tireless drone of a million lives lived sonar together—for this asylum. The house was a tall, compact Victorian, not with the Gothic threat of Slope House, but with an exhausted, drooping style, like a resigned ballet performer. Its windows were eyes that had seen too much and presently favored seeing inward.
Eleanor, a chronicler by exchange, adored the stillness. She might listen to herself think. Arthur, a composer enduring a years-long dry season of motivation, found the calm at first stunning, then… promising. It was a clear slate. They unloaded their lives into its high-ceilinged rooms, their developments quieted and aware, as if in a library or a museum.
The to begin with signature of the house was not a sound, but a direction.
It was Eleanor who took note of it. “Arthur,” she said one evening over a supper of broiled chicken, the clink of their cutlery irrationally uproarious in the feasting room. “Do you ever feel… observed? But not from anyplace. From one particular place?”
Arthur, cutting a potato, shook his head. “Can’t say that I do. Which particular place?”
She didn’t point. She never pointed. She let her fair look float towards the corner of the room where the ceiling met the two dividers. There was nothing there. No portrayal, no sconce, no imperfection in the mortar. Fair a corner.
“There,” she said, her voice scarcely a whisper. “It feels like something is there, and it’s looking absent from me.”
Arthur chuckled. “Looking absent? That’s a modern one. Ordinarily the complaint is around being gazed at.”
“No,” Eleanor demanded, her forehead wrinkled. “This is diverse. It’s the act of disregarding that feels forceful. It’s a nearness that has considered me unworthy of its consideration. It’s… significantly lonely.”
Arthur came over to the table and crushed her hand. “It’s a huge, ancient, purge house, Ellie. It’s fair for us and tidy. Our minds are filling in the blanks.”
She needed to accept him. But the feeling continued. It was an unobtrusive weight, a cold spot in the outskirts of her vision that vanished when she turned to confront it head-on. It was continuously in a corner, continuously curled up, and it was continuously, unequivocally, looking away.
A week afterward, Arthur found his motivation. He called it his “Corner Sonata.” He set up his console in the living room, specifically underneath one of the corners Eleanor had said. He played inadequate, discordant chords, songs that would climb ideally, as it were, to shred and break up into atonal whispers. He was ecstatic.
“It’s like it’s giving me the silence,” he told her, his eyes landing with a fervor she hadn’t seen in a long time. “But a molded quiet. Quiet and purposeful. It’s not a purge; it’s full of things choosing not to be heard.”
Eleanor tuned in to the frequenting, unfinished pieces. They didn’t sound like music to her. They sounded like the aural proportion of a shadow confining itself from a divider and sneaking away. They made her feel the same significant forlornness as the corners.
The house started to express itself through reflection. Eleanor, while cleaning an ancient silver hand mirror she’d found in a pantry, caught a development. In the twisted, matured surface, for a division of a moment, she didn’t see her claim confront. She saw the corner of the room behind her, and in it, a swoon, a dim smear, like ancient chalk tidy, drifting. It was molded enigmatically like an individual who had been required to stand confronting the divider. She dropped the reflector, its glass splitting over the non-image.
She didn’t tell Arthur. He was as well profound in his work as thankful to the house for opening his imagination. To complain felt like ingratitude.
The moment stage was one of mutilation. Objects started to endure from a tender, determined entropy. A straight bookshelf in Arthur’s thinking created a slight but verifiable list, causing the books to slide ceaselessly to one conclusion, as if the rack were attempting to turn itself into an incline driving into the corner. The designs on their wallpaper—a classy damask—seemed to contort and tie themselves into unused, more complex arrangements if gazed at for tooling, the twists fixing like fists.
They both saw it but talked of it in metaphors.
“The house is settling,” Arthur would say.
“It’s like it’s dreaming,” Eleanor would reply.
They were both right and both awfully wrong.
The genuine frightfulness started with the photos. Eleanor was digitizing their ancient photo collections. She checked a picture from their wedding day: the two of them cutting the cake, giggling, encompassed by companions. On the screen, the picture was culminating. But the printed duplicate she made for a modern outline was off-base. In the foreground, between the obscured figures of her close relative Maureen and a college companion, stood a tall, dark figure. Its back was to the camera. Its head was tilted, not in pity, but in a pose of strong, centered carelessness. It was looking absent from the celebration, into the dim corner of the leased hall.
Her blood went cold. She burrowed through the box of firsts. It wasn’t in the negative. It wasn’t on the advanced filter. It had, as it were, showed up in the print, making the interior of this house.
She started a wild-eyed mystery review. She republished photographs from their ancient flat, from excursions, and from family Christmases. In each single one printed on the inkjet in Arthur’s ponder, an unused figure showed up. Now and then it was little, a dim smear in the distant remove of a shoreline scene, confronting the skyline. Some of the time it was closer, in the walkway of a grocery store, looking at a rack of canned products with its back to the camera. It was never locked in. It was continuously partitioned, disconnected, and wrapped in a cocoon of purposeful disregard.
It was continuously looking away.
She stood up to Arthur that night, spreading two dozen photographs over the kitchen table. “Do you see it?” she requested, her voice trembling.
Arthur looked. He picked up a photo of them climbing in the Rockies. He squinted. “See what, Ellie? It’s us. At the Icy Mass National Stop. That was a great day.”
“Look!” she screeched, poking a finger at the edge of the trees. “There! In the woods!”
He looked once more, longer this time. His front withered. “Is that… a person?”
“It’s in all of them, Arthur! Each one I’ve printed here. It’s him. The one in the corners.”
An interesting look passed over Arthur’s face—not fear, but an unfolding, terrible understanding. “The listener,” he whispered.
“The what?”
“That’s what I call it. The nearness. In my music. It’s not a watcher. It’s an audience. But it’s not tuning in to me. It’s tuning in absent from me. It’s… composing the hush I play into.”
They stood in the murmuring quiet of their kitchen, the truth of their circumstance coiling around them. The house wasn’t frequented by a phantom that looked for them. It was plagued with a nearness that characterized itself by its outright dismissal of association. Its vitality was one of preeminent, infinite lack of concern. And it was engraving itself on them, on their belongings, and on their exceptional recollections.
Arthur’s composition changed. The cheerful notes vanished completely. His “Corner Sonata” got to be a distressing, moderate piece built around rests and maintained, rotting tones. He would play a single, moo note on the piano and hold the pedal down, sitting impeccably still as the sound blurred into nothingness, tuning in to the quiet that followedwith a riveted, devout escalation. He was chasing the audience. He was attempting to get to it.
Eleanor battled it. She bought shining, gaudy lights to expel the shadows from the corners. She played boisterous, populist music on a radio—top 40 hits, conversation, anything with the human voice locked in in ordinary association. But the house ingested it. The light appeared to dim some time recently; it came to the corners. The music sounded tinny and far off, as if broadcast from another nation a long time ago.
She found Arthur standing in his conservatory, confronting a corner. He wasn’t moving.
“Arthur?”
He didn’t turn. “It’s so much wealthier than we are,” he said, his voice full of wonder. “Our lives are so boisterous and frantic. It just… is. It doesn’t require anything. It doesn’t require us.”
“I require you!” she cried, grabbing his arm and pulling him around. His confrontation was quiet and pure. He looked at her as if she were a gently, curiously colored wall.
That was the day the quiet got to be total for Eleanor. She had misplaced him. He had been enticed by the appeal of supreme apathy.
She chose forto take off. She pressed a snack for each of them. She went to him thinking about telling him they were going right presently, this moment. He was at his console, but he wasn’t playing. He was sitting with his back to the entryway, his shoulders slumped.
“Arthur, we’re leaving.”
He didn’t respond.
She strolled around to confront him. His eyes were open, but they were settled on the corner of the room. His hands were in his lap. He was impeccably, totally still. He was breathing, but so gradually she had to observe his chest for a full minute to be sure.
“Arthur!” She shook him. His head lolled marginally, but his look remained bolted on the corner. A low, delicate moan escapedhis lips, a sound of significant satisfaction. It was the sound of letting go.
Terror, immaculate and supreme, at long last seized her. This was the frightfulness. Not a hop frightener, not a creature with claws. It was the calm, willing disintegration of a human soul into nothingness. It was the triumph of impassion over love.
She ran. She cleared him out of there. She fled the ponder, snatched her sack from the lobby, and yanked open the front door.
And stopped.
The world exterior was gone.
Not dim. Not supplanted by a void. It was simply… unfinished. The patio steps dissolved into an indistinct dark fog. The oak tree in their yard was a schematic, a portrayal of obscured lines. The sky was a level, matte sheet of off-white. It was a world without detail, without profundity, without meaning. A world that was looking away.
The house had not fairly tainted them; it had devoured their setting. There was no place to run since the place in the world they had a place to be had been eradicated by an unavoidable, delicate nothingness.
Eleanor gradually closed the entryway. The press of the hook was the last, supreme sound. She turned and leaned against the wood, sliding down to sit on the floor of the hallway.
She caught on presently. The nearness wasn’t in the house. The house was in the neighborhood. They had moved interior a substance that lived by the guideline of segregation. It didn’t despise them. It didn't indeed take note of them sufficiently to despise them. It basically was, and its nature was to unwind, to calm, and to still.
She looked down the corridor towards the living room. She may see the corner of Arthur’s conservatory from here.
A thought happened to her, calm and appalling. If you couldn’t battle it, and you couldn’t escape it, there was, as it were, one thing cleared out to do. To get it. To genuinely see what it saw.
She stood and strolled gradually down the corridor. She passed the split reflection on the divider and saw her reflection—a pale, panicked lady in a blurring world. She entered the study.
Arthur hadn’t moved. He was a landmark to inattention.
Eleanor didn’t look at him. She strolled to the center of the room. She took a profound, shivering breath. And at that point, gradually, she turned her back on her spouse. She raised her head and settled her look on the purge corner where the dividers and ceiling met.
For a long time, she saw nothing. Fair paint and mortar. She let her eyes lose focus. She calmed her intellect. She ceased attempting to tune in for something and started to tune in to the quiet itself.
And at that point, she felt it. The weight. The cold spot. The significant, gravitational forlornness. It was there. And it was looking away.
She pushed harder. She attempted to take after its look. What was so critical in that clear corner that it required such an add-up to neglect for everything else?
She poured all her will into it, into not seeing the room, into not hearing the swoon sound of Arthur’s moderate breath, into not feeling the cherish and the fear that were all that was cleared out of her.
And for a single, shattering moment, she succeeded.
She saw what it saw.
Nothing.
Absolute, culminating, wonderful Nothing. A nullity so total it felt like peace. A quiet so profound it was a melody. It was the reply to each address she had ever inquired about, and it was the disintegration of the address itself. It was the conclusion of yearning, of torment, of memory. It was the consolation of being a shake, a bit of clean, a corner in a purge room.
A little, delicate murmur got away from Eleanor’s lips. It was a sound of significant contentment.
Her hands, which had been clenched at her sides, loosened. Her shoulders dropped. The wild-eyed metronome of her heart started to moderate, to develop, to space its beats, and to encourage and advance apart.
She did not move. She did not require it. She was precisely where she was assumed to be. She was looking away.
And in the calm house on Cedar Twist, the hush was at last, flawlessly, total.
Ayesha Mansoor is a passionate Software Engineer from Pakistan, currently working remotely with an American company. With a strong background in technology, she enjoys tackling complex problems and contributing to innovative projects that make a real impact.
Alongside her technical career, Ayesha nurtures a deep love for creative writing, where she blends imagination with emotion to craft engaging and heartfelt pieces. Her favorite topics include gardening, flowers, fairy tales, and love stories, fiction, nonfiction, tech, fashion, etc. each reflecting her fascination with nature and human connection.
An avid reader and lifelong learner, Ayesha finds inspiration in stories that spark curiosity and empathy. She strives to maintain a balance between her analytical mindset and creative spirit, continuously exploring new ways to grow both professionally and personally
