QAF Narrative No. 60
The House That Burned and the House That Remained
Yesterday, I was dizzy. Whenever that happens, I think of Hitchcock’s Vertigo. The film arrives uninvited, bringing its longing to recover what has disappeared.
I had postponed visiting Gibson House for months. This time, I didn’t want to miss the opportunity. I went with the dizziness, hoping the house would give my attention somewhere else to settle.
When I arrived, the guide was explaining a clock to another visitor. She invited me to listen. As she spoke, I noticed the name on the card hanging around her neck.
Madeleine. Or at least, that was how I read it. The same name as the woman in Hitchcock’s Vertigo.
It felt as though Hitchcock had followed me inside.
Parts of the clock, she said, had been saved when David Gibson’s original home was burned. I looked at the clock’s dial behind the glass and wondered what time it had shown when the fire began. What hour? What minute? Had anyone thought to look?
A clock can survive a disaster without preserving its time.
Gibson’s wife, Eliza, rescued its face and mechanism in 1837. The wooden case came later, during the family’s exile in New York. I was looking at something assembled across a rupture: the workings of an earlier life inside a later body.
Madeleine explained Gibson’s rebellion, exile, and return. William Lyon Mackenzie, Toronto’s first mayor and the rebel whose story I had encountered before, entered the room through her account. Gibson had joined the Upper Canada Rebellion of 1837. Government forces burned his farmhouse in retaliation.
The house around me was built in 1851, after the family returned. The place where I stood and the place I was imagining were separated by years, though the clock belonged to both.
A dining table was laid with patterned plates and glasses. Red curtains hung beside the clock. Everything offered the reassuring outline of a home. Yet I kept imagining the other house beneath it.
This building had needed saving, too. North York bought the property in 1965 to protect it from demolition. In 1971, it opened as a museum. Fire had taken one home; the city’s growth nearly took another.
Then there was Gibson’s profession: land surveyor.
He measured and mapped land for settlement. The boundaries, roads, and parcels helped turn territory into property within a colonial system. The museum’s own history places his work, and that of his sons, within a settler colonial agenda.
I tried to fit this man beside the rebel Madeleine had described. He could oppose the government and still help extend the world it governed. I wondered how his rebellion against the government fitted with his work surveying land for colonial settlement. What had he seen when he looked across a field? What had his measurements left outside the lines?
Another image unsettled me: a woman on the wall, with long, winding locks, jewellery, and a vessel held close to her chest. To my eyes, she seemed to belong to an imagined East, unexpectedly present in this Western farmhouse. I didn’t know where the picture came from, who had chosen it, or when it arrived.
Something in her seemed familiar before I could name it, as though she knew a forgotten corner of my own unconscious. My eyes followed the curves of her hair and found another image: the spiral of Madeleine’s hair in Hitchcock’s film, echoing Carlotta’s hairstyle in the portrait.
Reincarnation came to mind, stirred by the film’s illusion of a dead woman returning through a living one. Then I remembered the novel Hitchcock’s film was adapted from: The Living and the Dead, by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac.
The title seemed to reach into the room. A clock in another body. A house built after a house had burned. A woman whose hair carried me toward another woman, in another museum, inside a film. I was turning through this circle of imagined reincarnations when the voice of Madeleine, the museum guide, brought me back to the room.
She was showing me an old map of Toronto and the surrounding county, crowded with names and boundaries. She told me about a talk on October 17, during the house’s 175th anniversary celebration. The celebration would run from 11 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. The lines on the map gave my eyes somewhere to rest.
I told myself I would come back. Once more, without the dizziness. I wanted to learn more about this rebellious divider of land, and perhaps about the woman on the wall.
I still didn’t know the hour of the fire. But I had a time for coming back.
YF, October 5, 2026
The Story Only You Can Tell
Is there a memory or life experience you’ve always wanted to put into words? In QAF Story Lab, I’ll help you turn it into a short story, with personal feedback along the way. With each writer’s permission, we’ll also select stories to publish for our audience of more than 2,000 readers.
If you’re interested, click the button below to learn more.
Special Offers from Our Partners
Explore a selection of offers from our partners and discover something you may enjoy.
QAF Narrative may earn a commission when you use these offers.
