At night, if you stand on the hill and look up, you can see them: white columns of steam rising from every rooftop into the dark sky. On this world, every house stores its own air and lives off it, and whatever warmth builds up inside escapes, little by little, through vents in the roof.
When I first married into this house, I thought it was just steam. Nothing more. As it turns out, I might be the only person on this hill who ever thought that.
The neighbors greet each other by reading the columns. “Towa’s place is really putting one up today.” A tall column means a warm house — full of people, full of noise. A thin one gets you worried looks. No column at all, and everyone knows the house sits empty.
Ours sits right at the top of the hill. Best sunlight around, the spot everyone wanted. What nobody mentioned before I moved in is that spots like this make the air swell more than anywhere else — and leak more, too.
That’s why Sou was always out there sealing the seams with wax. “It’s such a waste,” he’d say, over and over, like it was carved into him. Thanks to his work, our vents let out nothing but a thread of a column, the thinnest on the hill. He was proud of it. The house that wasted the least air — that was us.
That winter, Sou left for a month-long supply run to a distant city. The night before he set off, he was still there under the lamp, carefully sealing every gap. “No point losing air while I’m gone.” I watched his careful hands work, not really thinking about it.
Once his boat pulled away, the nights got long. Too long.
Across the valley, old Towa’s column kept rising as tall as ever. She’d wave at me with the height of her steam, the way you’d shake out laundry. “As long as it’s leaking, someone’s still home,” she liked to say, and she’d cackle.
Then, the morning Sou was due back, her column just — stopped.
I heard later that she’d moved to be with her daughter, on another world. The house went quiet, dark, indistinguishable from empty. Just days before, that column had stood so tall. How does a house turn into the picture of absence so fast, the moment the person inside is gone?
That night, a kind of fear crept up on me.
Our column is thinner than thread. Sou sealed it so well it barely rises at all. And every house up here does the same — hoards its air, huddles in the dark. If Sou looked up at this hill on his way home, in the dark — would he even know which house was ours?
What tells apart a house that’s empty from a house that’s waiting?
I went to the kitchen and put my finger on the seam Sou had sealed with wax. His voice — it’s such a waste — echoed somewhere behind my ear. I peeled it back anyway.
A white column rose slowly out of the vent. Our roof breathed for the first time in ages. Warmth streamed out into the sky, more than felt right to lose. Watching it go, I finally understood something: there had still been warmth left in this house, all along. It took a leak to see it.
Late that night, a single light came home over the dark water.
The light wandered the dark hill for a while, then turned, steady and certain, toward the one column still standing white against the sky. It climbed toward us.
The moment Sou stepped inside, he noticed the broken seal and his eyes went wide. I braced for a scolding, shoulders already halfway to a shrug.
But he just looked up at the column for a long moment. Then he reached over and widened the gap a little more with his own finger.
“Without this,” he said, “I wouldn’t have known which house was ours.”
The column climbed higher still. Tonight, our house is putting up the brightest steam on the whole hill.