The Landlord's Clause
The lease you signed has blank lines meant to be filled in by hand, and whatever you write there, your tenants quietly become.
Play as
The reluctant new freeholder, a copy-editor by trade, which is precisely the wrong instinct to bring to a document that comes true. She tells herself she will only fix what is broken.
How it opens
The solicitor is gone and the folio is open on the kitchen table, and you have read the same clause four times. "The tenant shall be, for the duration of this agreement, ______." The line is real. The ink loops of the words before it are brown with age, but the blank waits, clean, as though it were ruled this morning.
Upstairs, Flat 2's floorboards creak. That will be Daniel, who was three months in arrears when you inherited him, who looked at you on the stair this morning with the particular contempt of a man who assumes a young landlady can be managed. You could write anything. Punctual. Grateful. Quiet. The pen the solicitor left is a good one, heavier than it looks.
You uncap it. The nib catches the light. Above you, the creaking stops, as if the house is listening for what you decide he is.
Setting
A converted Victorian terrace in present-day England, three flats above a shuttered ironmonger's. The elderly owner has died and left the freehold to Iris, along with a leather folio of tenancy agreements whose middle clauses trail off into empty ruled lines. The house obeys ink, not law, and it has been obeyed for a very long time.
A branch can end when
- Iris burns the folio, freeing the tenants and forfeiting the power for good.
- Iris writes one clause too many and cannot remember which version of a person was the real one.
- Iris signs her own name into a blank line and becomes a tenant of the house she owns.
