2 Answers

His mind was empty as he stared at the vacant house. The environment around it was spooky and the neighbour next door looked like a bikie. He decided not to rent it and drove off.

the newly listed home was vacant, which i expected.  What i didn't expect,however, was that it was empty.    All the places i'd been to look at  were vacant, emptied of furniture,utilities,people;atmosphere...etc.

But that was the first place that was empty, and i felt it and knew it immediately.  What i didn't know 'immediately'  was what made it empty, or anyway  what  gave me such a powerful and weird impression.

as far as i could tell nothing about the environment inside or out  had anything to do with its emptiness.  i mean really, vacant houses are by definition 'empty,' aren't they?   how much stranger would it be to enter a vacant house that wasn't empty?  now that would be something worthy of note [and lots of carefully constructed sentences "using the following words....].

on the way in the neighbor on the left smiled at me.  It wasn't an unusual smile full of  some mysterious hidden meaning that set-off an instinctive alarm within me warning danger!  danger! ...like a line in a novel.  it was just a  "we are strangers who made eye contact  and the polite response is to smile"  kind of a thing.  that was all.

the worst part of the whole thing?  i loved the house!  it was in my budget, in the neighborhood where i'd wanted to live, it had working solar panels (solar panels!  how green/cool would i be?).  It was partially "water supplied' with well water and  had  a compost thing-a-ma-gig in the back yard. 

there was even a chicken coop shed  the realitor assured me could be converted to something more practical.  My family had Road Island Red chickens when i was a kid.  What could be more practical than fresh brown eggs to eat and share with [inundate LOL!] my friends,family,neighbors, unsuspecting strangers too nice to decline (hey, chickens lay eggs every day, including during holidays and in  bad weather, when the coop is further away from the house) (oh, and even when you've accrued more eggs than you have friends or appetite) than my very own mini egg factory?

yet...the house was ...empty. 

i still don't know what that meant.  i gave a list of trumped-up reasons why i passed on that house.  until now i've never spoken of the 'empty' thing.  how could i?  even now i don't understand it.    every so often, though, i still  think about that house.  with regret.

and i wonder if it's still empty.

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