NOVEL WEB The house breaks
I'm not sure where I've ended up. I was just wandering around as I always do at nighttime, and I didn't even leave the house. I just noticed that there was a strange little noise coming from the corner cabinet in the kitchen (the one overgrown with moss, the house is old) and I looked inside. I kept reaching in and in to see if I could reach the source of the noise. Sobbing or an odd laugh? Couldn’t quite tell, but I wanted to know because it just seemed important, it just seemed important (the house knows many things, many enchantments).
Reached inside further and further, till it became big enough to crawl in there. Then big enough to walk. Maybe then the sun started rising, since that would explain the light, but why is there so much grass in the cabinet? Why is there an entire field?
Maybe it doesn’t matter. There are organs on the field. The organs of the house. The real house doesn’t have a chimney, but I know that that tower shaped like a chimney is the house’s. It’s important to the house, the house sees it in its dreams and it sees it the same as I do right now: Glimmering, hidden behind a chill morning mist which might make some people miserable, but the house? It feels alive. The blast of winter cold fills it with vigour and almost makes it feel like it could be human again.
There's a door in the middle of the field, and it's attached to just a fragment of a wall. I know this door, it's got little mushrooms growing on it sometimes and the ceiling above it cries all the time (the house is very old).
I walk across the field, looking up. The floorboards are the clouds in the sky. They start forming a little ceiling. And they creak every time I look at them, trying to pull themselves together so they stop rotting. “It’s a futile task,” I tell them, and the ceiling starts leaking.
I’m about to open the door in the middle of the field, but then my attention turns to a corner. Many corners of the house, in fact, all scattered across the field. They’ve all got little pictures, and self-made murals, and all sorts of memorabilia.
All scattered.
All crumbling, bit by bit.
As I look around, more and more of these corners show up. Not a single one is connected to another, and even when it looks like a new structure may connect to an old one, the old one disappears. The floorboards start to smell, they’re rotting and they’re crying and they’re falling. The moss on the door grows more and more and more.
I’ve TRIED to fix the house before, I’ve tried. I’ve tried to clean out the moss, but the more I clean the more it grows back. I replace the floorboards when they rot too much and I clean them all the time and I do everything possible not to let the moisture build up, yet the house keeps crying. It’s old and it has seen a lot. I don’t know what to do.
I go across the field and try to look at each and every corner of the house, each and every fragment of the house. The crying noise, the one which led me here in the first place, it gets louder and louder. The vibrations from it seem to shake each corner, each little painting and houseplant and gift from someone from long ago. The crying is an earthquake and the tears make a flood, I can’t save it, the chimney-tower is huge and it is the house’s friend– no, it used to be the house’s friend. It’s crumbling now, it’s dying.
The floorboards try not to rot and I tell them it’s futile again, and this is a mistake. But there is not much else to do. I keep running across each corner of the house and it can’t keep itself together, the field is vast and I don’t think there is any limit to how it expands. It’s infinite.
The house is nothing, nothing compared to this emptiness in which its structure is scattered. The different floors, the stairs, the roof, they’ve all been broken into pieces and I try to run around (it’s futile) and do something about the flooding, about the leakages and the cracks and the moss growing over the paintings and photographs and memories, fungus over corpses of people held only in memory (the house is very old) and the empty empty field (the emptiness) seems to laugh at me and the hosue.
The field’s laughter is… how do you describe it? It rumbles everywhere. Wherever it goes, the grass catches on fire.
Infectious laughter. It makes me laugh too, and it’s uncontrollable and I cannot stop and it is hollow. Infectious fire.
It’s been a while since I even thought about fire, I’ll be honest. I forgot what it looked like. I forgot what its heat felt like, because the whole house is damp, no matter what I do. Fire was simply unimaginable.
But if the house is nothing against the emptiness, it is less than nothing against the flames which eat the emptiness. And it’s nothing against the smoke that rises up and gets into the ceiling, the soot and embers which choke the floorboards. They’re rotting and they’ve stopped trying. As they float above me, I smile at them sadly and stop running across the field. I may as well listen to what I told them, yes? So I stop trying to fix the house, I stop resisting the fire and laughter, I stop resisting the suffocation I stop trying to… well, I just stop.
Futile, all futile. The house and the field and the grass and fragments of memories, all of it goes up in flames. But at least that’s better than rotting in its own tears.
The house stops crying.