...of a haunted house

I knew, in that hospital, my mother would shake and scream. All right. Perhaps she would only moan. I tried to tell myself it would be for the best if both my parents were put away. My aunt was yet another fruitcake. The two of us together could not take care of an unopened can of corn. It would be best this way, it would be, and oh, indeed, it was: the house was quiet; empty for most of the day, it stored up silence, and spent it in the evening when I would lie like a length of silk ribbon in the crack of a book, and read the way the famished eat, almost wildly for a while, and then slowly as though the words made up my cud. It was accomplished; they were gone for their good and I was glad; the house was quiet; there was a calm to its objects which involved more than their sitting in their customary situations - which is nearly all they did anyway - because they had to feel their release from the accidents of ill or drunken ownership deep in their braces, slats, and naps, as if the dust they continued to collect was no longer the dust of indifference or of slovenliness, it was silence's sand, and so was suitable to the quiet light which fell now through afternoon windows, and the hush which hung like another drape where their stuff stood as a sentry stands in a watchful place: like my father's things racked in the hall closet, his gangsterism felt hat, his pot, too, stored, his trays, and cane, and chair pushed into a corner, waiting for the day of his death, whence their removal, dispersal, and sale, since, when the sounds of such a sad life went, when the pain, the acrimony, which contrasted with this calm, departed, they didn't go away for a week's vacation, a trip taken for their health; they were sounds doomed, nevermore to be made, as the poet says: no more piss hiss in the pot, or the carpeted tap of my father's cane, his soft groans, I always thought, like rotting fruit, and the small sniffs and elongated sighs my mother emitted like something on low heat, or the radio tuned to Jack Benny or the voice of my father talking back to the news, the special rattle, I remember, of his paper, as he wrestled to refold its pages, the snip of his reading light coming on in the dusk, water running in the kitchen sink, the scuff of my mother's slippers over the linoleum which told me if she was well enough to fix dinner, the click of cards she played, and the sound of their shuffle: when we die what we do dies: good or ill, both lose their patron; when we leave our house, our place of life, however sordid, what we did their leaves, and the rooms we occupied - insulted, misused - breathe, as though in and out a different lung, another atmosphere; yes, I had forgotten that fact, that we then - ma and pa, father, mother, me - when we die what we do dies. What a loss! what a never matter! what a mercy!

[The Tunnel, Gass, W. H.]