The voice from Barbara’s sink gained courage. It sniffled once, as though trying to collect itself for what it was about to say. “You really don’t know who I am?”
She didn’t appreciate the question. It made her feel like she wasn’t part of some big secret. Which, considering she had no idea how her kitchen sink was speaking to her, she guessed that she wasn’t.
“I really don’t,” Barbara said, defeated. She waded through the water to her kitchen chair, moving the bucket placed on top of it with disgust. The bucket had been a last-ditch effort to prevent the flooding caused by the leak, but it had done little other than throw her back out.
“But we know each other,” the voice continued desperately. “I still remember the day your dad started building, and the meeting he had with the laundry designers after your parents disagreed on the best tiling, and the—”
Barbara cut the voice off. “How do you know that?”
Fear rose in her body. Her dad had built the home over fifty years ago. She had barely been old enough to stand.
“Because we know each other,” the voice replied. “I am your house.”
Barbara felt her mouth drop open, but there were no words that made their way out. If this insane idea was true, then how had she never noticed the house was alive before?
She asked the house as much, and it explained everything. It talked about how her dad had poured so much love into it that it had sprouted into life. How it had adored watching a young Barabara interrogate the best bathroom designers in the Melbourne area. Melbourne became its home, and she became its family. It explained that it had never spoken to her out of fear that she wouldn’t believe it.
“I would have believed you,” she whispered, but she knew that even now she doubted it.
“I didn’t want to scare or hurt you, not to mention that talking hurts.”