Weekly Writing – September 14 2024

He didn’t need to risk removing his glove for a sure diagnosis. The brickwork’s fever baked through the leather, radiating faintly against his face even at an arm’s-length distance. The light through untinted windows swam nonetheless in a sallow corona, flickering with the cadence of what the superstitious would call a sickened heartbeat.
But a house needed no human organs in order to fall ill – just a different sort of illness. The landlord stood by in the sullen, distinctive misery of a man who stood to lose money, calculating how he could most quickly cure that loss or share the symptoms with others.
“Indeed, it’s masonrot, just as your tenants claimed,” the doctor announced, stepping back to where that fever was a bare kiss of warmth against his cheeks and nose. “They must know their home well – most wouldn’t have noticed the symptoms at this stage, not in the heat of summer.”
But those who loved and attended closely to a home tended to develop a keen sense for its disquiet. The landlord ground his teeth under a well-groomed moustache.
“What will it take to fix it?” he asked.
“I’ll provide you with a list of the herbs and compounds you must acquire. The house will have to be sealed and steamed for a minimum of three days and nights, after which you should leave it open for a week, doors and windows, allowing healthy air to wash out whatever is left of the foul. At this stage, that should be sufficient. If the disease is allowed to progress, treatment will only become more costly, eventually requiring removal of the most affected materials – or, in severe cases, complete destruction of the building to save its neighbours.”
Those calculations of cure and symptoms lurked behind the landlord’s eyes, as sour and concerning as house-fever. Whatever he made a pretense of agreeing to, the doctor decided, a follow-up visit would certainly be in order. In a week, to see if the doors and windows were standing open to the healthy breeze or if blisters had started to push up through the brickwork, oozing sickness that could consume an entire city if left untreated.