The House By Bell Summary

Bell’s house sits next to a small grove of winterstripped trees. It was inherited. You can see it from the road, though through some geographic trickery the road is rarely visible from the house, even from the second story. A passer-by might get the impression that the house was built amongst the trees, but that they have shuffled away in the decades since for fear of association. The house does not appear troubled.
The property used to be a farm, but it makes little sense to call it that now; farms are farms by function, and no one tills this soil. An unlit stove is a metal box. Bell took the house as a place to make paintings, but uses it as a place to sulk. She has owned it for six months. She has slept in it for eleven nights. Bell does …show more content…
The house is fifty-four. It is February six.
From the kitchen, Bell wonders if she should hear birds. She doesn’t. It is early afternoon. She thinks about painting, then she thinks about him, then she thinks about taking the back door off its hinges and picking it to tiny little splinters with her fingernails. It’s far too cold already to sacrifice a back door, and she shuffles up the stairs and back to bed.
Bell adjusts the covers several times. Exasperated sighs accompany each instance. She kicks the blankets off altogether, flailing with exaggerated movements, and lies panting on the sheet. It has been this way for days. The house creaks, and Bell imagines the sound to be a lover sleeping on the other side of the bed, rolling over and away from her, probably forever. She snatches a book off her nightstand. Bell reads for twelve minutes. Just as she begins to forget herself, a character utters the words ‘to,’ ‘be,’ and ‘honest’ in sequence. He said that, she thinks, all the time. She has one of those tiny instants in which the possibility of God enters her mind. Now self-conscious and feeling watched, Bell feels a reaction is necessary. She spits on the page, closes the book, and flings it at the opposite wall. A window rattles. Bell thinks it sounds like a dry laugh and glares at the window frame. She reflects upon the events of the last ten seconds, feels silly, and decides to get out of the house for a …show more content…
Bell shivers and looks up at the trees. She thinks it odd that they throw down their covering just before the world gets its coldest, darkest, meanest. In a fit of wild and senseless inspiration, she leaps to her feet and casts her red jacket onto the ground, lifting her arms to the sky in epiphany. The moment is quickly frosted over, however, as Bell realizes that she has not escaped the shackles of physical suffering, and that the world is, in fact, significantly colder than it was even when she put the red jacket on in the first place. She is now completely awake, and still completely not a