Animal Invasion
Published in Hudson Valley Magazine, August 2007
One of the most beautiful, yet frightening, short stories I’ve ever read is just a few pages long. “House Taken Over,” by the Mexican writer Julio Cortázar, tells of a brother and sister living together peacefully in their home after their parents die – and then the house is taken over by unknown and angry spirits. We never see the spirits, but the brother evidently knows just how dangerous they are.
One by one, rooms are rendered off-limits as the spirits spread, until at the end, brother and sister flee altogether, with the brother locking the front door and throwing away the key – not to guard what’s no longer their property except in name only, but to protect any poor fool of a burglar from being tempted to enter a seemingly empty house.
I was thinking of the story the other day when I considered how thoroughly creatures other than us take over our cabin each summer, here on a wooded hillside in Woodstock.
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What do you think?