In the beginning, there was the house. I knew that I had to find the house: it was here in this city somewhere, and it had my name on it. It would belong to me unconditionally; all I had to do was to find it.
Thus upon my arrival in the city of ice, I started looking for the house. I went out every day, trundling through the rainy October streets, neighbourhood after neighbourhood.
I looked in the West and I looked in the East. I looked them up and down, the streets: I looked at Euclid and I looked at Palmerston. I looked at every street that connected perpendicularly with the Danforth. I looked on Logan, Pape, Eaton. I searched up and down Coxwell for the house. I went to sit on the doorsteps of many houses, particularly ones with For Sale signs on them, to test to see if the doorstep felt like mine. None of them did.
The houses started playing hard to get. They changed their numbers randomly. Suddenly, I would see a number 57 right next to a number 123. They were obviously playing a game with me, hiding from me so that I could not find the one true house that would be inevitably, undeniably, rightfully and eternally mine.
In the night, the houses flew into outer space. I knew that that was their game: that was what they had to be doing in order to rearrange their numbers. They would go on their tours of outer space and then they would arrange with one of their buddies to swop lots. They would leave their streets as soon as their occupants were soundly asleep, unaware of their shenanigans. Then, just to confuse me, they would casually descend again just before dawn with smiles on their housey little faces, wide grins spread out over their arch little doorways, their windows winking at one another.
The houses thought I did not know what they were doing, and that I would end up questioning my own sanity as a result, but I was too smart for them. I was right on their case, right into the game myself, and I decided to get the better of them by arranging to be in different ones at different times, the ones most likely to go on space journeys according to their previously established behaviour patterns as far as I could discern them.
Although they were somewhat unpredictable, I could tell which houses looked as if they could be up for a jaunt, and so I would contrive to befriend their owners for a few hours in the afternoon, just so I could continue to sit inside in the evening and pretend to be asleep when the owners themselves would check out to the astral world for the night. That way, I would get to see outer space for free, I figured, and not only would the joke be on the houses, but I would become the most distinguished space-time traveller in humankind for my awareness of the capabilities of houses. It worked, although I never actually felt the houses move. They are amazingly smooth travellers when you consider how unprepared they are for the atmospheric changes around them.
No other humans knew what the houses were up to, for I did not tell anyone. The houses themselves were too dumb ever to figure out that I knew their game, or even that someone was awake inside them while they detached themselves at their roots, retracted their foundations and fired up their systems to go shooting the breeze among the stars. Ah, what fun we had, but they never realized it even once! They would have been shocked to their foundations, had they known that I was on to their little space-time continuum traversing thing, and that the gig was in fact up, and worse: that eventually I would tell all the other humans on the planet what they get up to, at night.
Houses are really, really stupid things.
