Signal 005: The House on the Hill, cute, with great curb appeal.

The hill did not rise cleanly. It hunched the newer houses just high enough to look down on Merle’s place, then dropped away behind them into a damp green floodplain where her father had built the house.

Merle’s house had not moved. That was the important thing. It had stayed where it was, sinking in its older lot with its cathedral canopy, with its brick face turned toward West Land Drive, its backyard stretched too far behind it, the way yards used to stretch long before home builders called themselves developers.

The subdivision came later. Late eighties. Early enough for gotta-wear-shades optimism, late enough for vinyl siding, garage doors, and dead ends were newly promoted to cul-de-sacs. A developer had taken what used to be depth and cut it into parcels. Not large parcels. New-house parcels. Forty or fifty feet of breathing room between doors, less if the neighbors had children, dogs, grills, opinions, or wind chimes.

Merle had not been asked. There is no record of that, but there did not need to be. Nobody had asked the woman in the old yellow brick house in the floodplain whether she minded the future being anchored into her backyard.

The Family of Three lived in the youngest house. Built in 1989, last to arrive, last nail in the idea that the back of Merle’s property was still the back of anything. Their yard met hers along a lot line that looked harmless enough on paper. A line. A surveyor’s mark. A legal fiction. But in the grass it meant two houses from two different decades breathing through the same property line.

Their house sat on the slope between Merle’s bottom and the House on the Hill.

The House on the Hill faced the Family of Three across the cul-de-sac. From the street it looked smaller than it was, which was one of its tricks. A cute, modest front. A polite face. It even had a few feet of white picket fence to sweeten its mask. Then it went back, backward into its lot until the yard gave up and became woods. Heavy woods.

This was the neighborhood’s shape: Merle low, the House on the Hill high, the Family of Three sloped between them, and all the newer houses set too close together.

Little boxes. Ticky-tacky. Little boxes.

Part of Closer. Sharper. Stranger. — a serialized Southern Gothic in fragments.