Write a story about a Mesoamerican child, in the style of Edgar Allan Poe, as it experiences the impacts of disease on everything it knows due to the arrival of Europeans.

The House Without Footsteps

You will tell me that a house cannot remember. You will say that stone is stone, that plaster has neither ear nor understanding, and that the little hollow beneath a threshold contains nothing more terrible than dust. I have heard such assurances from men who sleep.

But I was a child in the city upon the lake, and I know what a house becomes when it has learned the footsteps of its people—and hears them no more.

Before the sickness, ours was a house of innumerable sounds.

My mother ground maize before the light had fully entered the courtyard. The stone answered her hands with a patient, murmuring rasp. My father, who cut and fitted wood, tapped his tools against one another as though testing the voices of small birds. My sister carried water badly; one could follow her progress by the little splashes, and by the indignation with which she denied having spilled anything.

Beyond us, the city spoke without ceasing. Canoes struck the landings. Sellers called across the markets. Sandals whispered over the causeways. From the temples came the drums, immense and measured, and their sound passed through the walls and into my sleeping body, so that I believed the city possessed a heart.

I had never imagined that a heart might stop while the body remained.

The strangers had come before the sickness.

I saw them only once, from behind my father’s arm: men wrapped in hard brightness, seated upon creatures that seemed to me assembled from several animals and an evil dream. Their faces were pale or darkened by hair. Some looked about them with wonder. Others looked as my father looked at a length of timber before deciding where to cut.

That comparison is mine now. Then I thought only of their beasts.

“Do they sleep standing?” I asked.

My father did not answer. He was watching the men.

There were speeches, gifts, rumors. Then there was fighting. Then the strangers were driven out, and for a little while people spoke as though a door had been closed.

But something had entered which required no door.

The first sick person I knew was a woman who sold amaranth cakes near the landing. She had always pressed a broken piece into my sister’s hand, declaring it unfit for sale, though I never observed any defect in it. One morning her place was empty.

“She has a fever,” my mother said.

A fever was an ordinary misfortune. A fever belonged to the world in which people recovered, complained of weakness, and returned to their work.

Then our neighbor developed the spots.

I remember my mother standing in the courtyard after she had visited him. She held her hands away from her body. There was nothing upon them that I could see.

“What is it?” my father asked.

She shook her head.

It was the first time I understood that adults might withhold an answer because they had none.

Soon the sickness acquired a name, and the name traveled faster than the canoes. People spoke it at doorways, in the market, beside the water. They spoke of those who had carried it among the strangers and their followers. They spoke of other towns already afflicted. Each account contradicted another in some particular; all agreed upon the dying.

My father listened to a man who claimed the danger had passed.

That evening he began to shiver.

He lay beneath a covering and asked why the room was so cold. Sweat gathered beside his ears. When I touched his wrist, the heat frightened me more than his trembling.

“Fetch water,” my mother said.

I fetched it.

This was the beginning of that labor which became our entire life: the carrying of water from one place to another, as if we might quench a burning house by filling its cups.

The healer came while she could still walk from dwelling to dwelling. She examined my father, gave my mother instructions, and sat beside him longer than I expected. Her face was exhausted.

“Will he stand tomorrow?” I asked her.

She put her hand upon my head.

I hated her for that kindness.

The spots rose over him. They crowded his face until the familiar places—the small hollow near his mouth, the crease between his brows—were lost. He could not turn without pain. My mother lifted him, washed him, held water to his lips. When he cried out, she answered him quietly.

I had thought courage would be loud.

My sister sickened next.

She was angry at first. She demanded her little clay bird and then accused me of having exchanged it for another, because this one would not whistle properly. Her lips were swollen. She pushed the toy away.

I placed it beside her mat, within reach.

Outside, the city was becoming difficult to hear.

The market no longer sent its thousand voices over the water. A canoe drifted against the landing and remained there through an afternoon, knocking softly at the stones. Somewhere nearby, a dog barked until it was hoarse.

The drums continued for a time.

Then there were mornings when I woke before my mother and heard no grinding, no tools, no splashing, no drum.

Only breathing.

How intently I listened to it! I learned each breath in the room. My father’s caught deep in his chest. My sister’s came rapidly through her open mouth. My mother, when she slept, drew one long breath and let it go with a faint sound of protest.

I believed that listening was a duty. If I attended closely enough, none of them could cease without my permission.

My father died while I was at the water.

For years I considered this an accusation.

There were too few strong hands left to perform all the duties owed the dead. My uncle came with another man, and together they carried my father away. My uncle promised to return.

He did not return.

That night my mother took up one of my father’s tools. She held it in her lap until dawn.

Our ruler died, people said. Whole households had fallen silent. In some streets there was no one well enough to bring water to those who called for it. The news reached us in fragments from a neighbor who still came each day, though she had children of her own.

Once she brought food.

Once she brought only herself.

Both times my mother wept.

I became ill, but lightly. This seemed then a deliverance. Afterward it seemed a mistake for which I must eventually be made to answer.

During my fever I dreamed that the city’s canals had entered our house. Water moved beneath the mats. My father stood in it up to his knees, fitting wooden lids over the doorways. Behind each lid someone knocked.

When I woke, my sister was no longer breathing.

My mother had drawn a cloth over her face.

Beside the mat lay the clay bird.

I took it up, meaning only to move it. Yet some dreadful childish thought persuaded me that I must make it sound—that the fault had indeed been in the whistle, and could still be remedied.

I blew into it.

The note was thin, shrill, perfectly clear.

My mother made a sound I had never heard from any living creature.

She survived. I must tell you that. There were those who survived, who fed children not their own, who carried the helpless, who began again to grind maize. Our neighbor returned. Smoke rose from cooking fires. The water bore canoes once more.

But when the strangers came back, they came to a city already bereaved.

What followed—the siege, the hunger, the breaking of the houses—is remembered by men who count armies. I remember that my mother could no longer lift a full water jar without resting.

I remember how carefully we carried the smaller one between us.

Of our house, nothing remains that I could find. Yet sometimes, just before waking, I hear my father testing his tools. My mother’s stone begins its patient murmur. Water spills upon the courtyard floor.

Then, from the darkness close beside me, comes the small, indignant voice of my sister.

And I lie utterly still.

For as long as I do not open my eyes, I can almost believe she is waiting for an answer.