The house had been abandoned for years, but it stood like it remembered being loved. The walls were cracked, its windows shattered, and the front porch sagged like it had been holding its breath too long, but beneath the decay something pulsed, like neon veins under skin. Luna saw it first.
She was seven, barefoot and wild-eyed, tugging at her mother’s sleeve, “ Mama, it’s glowing,” she whispered, pointing to the house at the end of the street.
Nova squinted through the dusk. It wasn’t glowing, not exactly, but something about it shimmered, like memory trying to break through.
They had just moved into the neighbourhood, escaping a past that clung like smoke. Nova didn’t believe in signs anymore. She believed in survival, in making it to the next day without unraveling, but Luna believed in magic, and sometimes Nova let herself borrow her daughter’s eyes.
That night, Nova dreamed of the house. In her dream it was alive. The walls breathed. The floorboards whispered and in the attic there was a box filled with letters, each one addressed to her, written in a hand writing she hadn’t seen since she was seventeen.
She woke up gasping, her palms damp with sweat. Luna was curled beside her, one hand resting on her mother’s chest like she was keeping her heart steady. Nova kissed her forehead and stared at the ceiling. The house was calling.
The next morning she walked there alone. The air around it felt charged, like the moment before lightning strikes. She pushed open the gate and it groaned like it remembered her.
Inside, the house was a ruin. Dust hung in the air like ghosts, but the walls were covered in graffiti. Neon pinks, electric blues, and jagged reds. Names, dates and messages. It was a shrine to things long forgotten.
In the living room, she found a doll’s head nailed to the wall. Its eyes were missing, replaced with tiny mirrors. Beneath it, someone had scrawled: We see what we survived. Nova touched the mirrors, her reflection fractured.
She wandered through the house like she was walking through her own memory. In the kitchen she found a paper mache sculpture of a heart, split down the middle. Headlines about war and loss layered its surface. She felt something crack inside her.
In the attic she found the box, just like her dream. Inside were letters, hundreds of them, all addressed to her, all signed with the same name: Josh. Her first love. The one who left without a goodbye. The one she wrote poems about until the ink ran dry.
She read the first letter. It was dated the day after he left.
I didn’t know how to stay. But I never stopped loving you. She read another. I saw your art in a gallery once. I knew it was yours. The rage. The softness. The way you make pain look holy.
She read until her hands shook.
She didn’t cry. She didn’t want to scream. She just sat there, surrounded by words that had waited years to find her, and for the first time in a long time she felt seen.
When she returned home, Luna was painting. She had covered the living room wall in bright colours, neon bones, broken dolls, graffiti hearts.
“ I wanted to make it look like a house, ” she said.
Nova smiled, “ You did. ”
That night, Nova wrote a letter. Not to Josh. Not to the past. But to herself.
You survived. You made beauty out of a wreckage. You are the house. You are the neon bones. You are still here.
She folded the letter and placed it in a box. Then she handed Luna a marker.
“ Write something, ” she said.
Luna wrote: Mama is magic.
Nova laughed, “ You’re damn right I am. ”
They returned to the house together the next day. Nova brought her camera. Luna brought her paint. They turned the ruin into a canvas. They painted over the pain. They added their own stories. They made it theirs.
Neighbours started coming by. Some brought flowers, some brought memories. One woman cried when she saw a mural of her sister, lost to addiction.
“ She used to live here, ” the woman said.
Nova hugged her, “ She still does. ”
The house became a sanctuary. A gallery. A rebellion. People came from all over the world to see it. To add to it. To feel something.
Nova called it: The Neon Archive.
Luna called it home .
One day, Nova found a letter tucked into the mailbox. No stamp, no envelope, only a single folded page.
It read: I saw what you built. I’m proud of you. I’m sorry I couldn’t be part of it. But I’ll always be rooting for you.
It wasn’t signed, but she knew. She didn’t write back. She didn’t need to. Some stories don’t need closure. They just need to be transformed.
Years passed. Luna grew. Nova thrived. The house stood tall, covered in layers of love and loss and art. It was no longer abandoned. It was alive.
Every time someone asked Nova how she did it, how she turned pain into protest, how she made something beautiful out of what tried to break her, she would smile and say, “ I listened, I remembered, and I let the wreckage speak. ”
Because some houses aren’t just buildings. Some houses are women. And some women are made of neon bones.
The End.
Bio:
Brittany Szekely is a mother of three living in Coffs Harbour, NSW, Australia. She is a writer of poems and short stories and sometimes paints abstract art.