There was a woman who could feel what places carried. This was not unusual in those days. Many people had some version of it, faint enough that they could dismiss it as mood or weather or the quality of afternoon light. Hers was not faint. It had never been faint.
She became a keeper of houses. When a family moved out and the walls held everything they had left, the grief, the celebrations, the particular weight of a long marriage conducted in small rooms, she would go in and receive it. She had a practice: she walked each room slowly, staying until she had acknowledged what it held, and when she left the house was clear. Ready. Families who came afterward found the rooms open to them, which was what you wanted when you were beginning.
She was sought after. Other keepers worked faster. None worked more thoroughly. She took on the houses other keepers declined, the houses where something unresolved had pooled in the corners, the houses where the dead had stayed too long. She charged what the work was worth and people paid it.
What she could not do was enter her own home.
She had tried. Many times, over many years. Her house was across the square from the houses she cleared, a short walk she made every evening after her work. She would stand at her own door and be unable to go in. The house held all of her, every year, every version, accumulated until it was impenetrable. She was her own obstruction.
So she slept in the houses she had cleared. She would finish her work in the evening and stay in the bare room through the night, in the space that held nothing. In the morning she would eat what she had brought and walk back across the square and begin again. This is what she did for many years and she did not speak of it because there was nothing useful to say.
A traveler who passed through the town asked her where she lived. She pointed to the house across the square. "I have never slept there, " she said. The traveler waited for the rest of the explanation. She did not give it.
She grew old. At the end she could not take new assignments, her hands had developed a tremor and the work required stillness. She spent her days walking, which had always been without difficulty. Streets accumulated nothing. She had never understood why, but she had always been grateful for it.
One morning she came around the corner of the square and saw her house. She stopped. She had not stopped here in years. She walked toward it. She reached the door. She put her hand on the latch.
She walked past it. She kept walking to the end of the street, and around the corner, and into the market where the noise was. She bought bread. She did not look back.