This House Is Home 9

Since I moved in, the transom over my bedroom door -- clean of paint unlike most of the others -- has made my every passage Damoclean.

The transom is divided, and the left pane (looking out) has a rhombus of glass cleanly broken free of the rest of the pane, two sides the faces of the upper left corner, the two other vertices punctuating the two opposite sides. Even before I moved in, the inch or so offset of the glass in the four-sided figure has begged for tape or removal, remedy. But it has never moved or changed in any way; like everything else in this house, I have assumed a sort of stasis and grown been complacent.

Tonight, clunking upstairs in my cleated bike shoes, braced in lycra and long underwear and neoprene, helmeted, I greeted my roommate unseen in the TV room and headed to my room. I opened the door and as I passed beneath the transom I heard the inimitable sound of glass on glass, a thief's diamond etching a circle in a museum window under cover of night. I completed my stride before turning to see that the transom had turned on its hinge to parallel the floor, and the rhomboid had separated entirely, point down, to rest on the bottom of the frame.

A guillotine stayed. A reprieve. A warning.