From House of Houses
Kevin L. Donihe

Something is weird here. My nose is flush with the ceiling. Textured plaster digs into my bridge in a way that’s neither comfortable nor uncomfortable, just perplexing. Usually, the ceiling is nowhere near my nose.

Perhaps I’m levitating. I’d done that once before, but I was five then, and that was over twenty years ago. Not certain how or why it happened; I just remember waking up to find myself floating down the hallway in my tightie whities, waving at my parents as I passed their bedroom door as if nothing was amiss.

But my arm, it’s trailing off the bed, and I feel wood against my fingertips. That the bed might levitate seems logical, but not the entire floor. And something’s wrong with the wood, too. The boards feel rougher, more splintery than usual, like they’ve cracked and buckled overnight.

The New Madrid fault cuts a groove just beyond the other side of the state, in northeastern Arkansas and southeastern Missouri. When it shook in 1812, the Mississippi River flowed backwards and church bells rang out in Philadelphia. If that thing had gone off and caused immense damage 600 miles west, then Memphis is surely a crater now, bubbling with magma and more questionable substances brought forth from the center of the Earth.

Memphis. I’d only been to that city once. I didn’t like it. It felt dirty, quite possibly decayed at its core. Perhaps my judgment was rash, as I was observing the city through a window of a Greyhound bus, and such windows tend to put a greasy filter on all things, even beautiful, sublime ones.

Perhaps Nashville, over 250 miles west of that city, had likewise been destroyed. And what of Knoxville? That’s even closer. Had the ball-tipped tower of the ‘82 World’s Fair collapsed? Were dozens of people beneath it, dead and/or screaming? How many hearts had stopped and how many lungs were filled with blood in that town alone?

I shake away such thoughts. I’m working myself up needlessly. All I know for sure is that I perceive my nose, along with the remainder of my body, as being pressed between the ceiling and the bed. Though rendered immobile, I feel no pain. No trace of split skin or twisted bone. I dart my tongue and note the absence of bloody froth on or around my lips. Genitals, thank God, are likewise intact, though the ceiling is pressed against them in a way that’s more unpleasant than hurtful.

Maybe it wasn’t an earthquake. Maybe my house had been condemned without me knowing it. Sure, the place is (was?) a little cluttered, but it’s a neat, orderly, if not loving clutter. Since when does that warrant a surprise wrecking ball? And how could the city-people have known, unless they had eyes in the wall, or wall-piercing surveillance via satellite? Perhaps it was an issue of Imminent Domain.

Whatever the case, I doubt the neighbors will provide assistance or dial 911. I rarely see them leave their houses, so I sometimes imagine their places are really empty and discarded sets. The papers in their boxes disappear day after day, though. Someone’s getting them.

Still, even if they took the time to glance at my unfortunate house, they’d probably just call the city housing inspector, who’d hum and haw about my property before slapping a ‘condemned’ sticker on what used to be the front door. A contracted wrecking crew would then arrive to take down the debris, followed by a trash crew to haul them off. Not a soul would have searched for survivors.

The only neighbor (neighbot?) I ever see leave is one called ‘Harold.’ He waves whenever we’re both outside at the same time, which happens about once or twice a year. He once told me—I believe last fall—that he had a skin condition that made it impossible for him to step into the sun without protective clothing and special headgear, but I think that was just an excuse for him to avoid me, too. He wasn’t wearing anything on his head at the time, and all I saw on his body were shorts and a t-shirt.

Maybe I’m not giving the neighbors enough credit. They surely have emotion, if not traces of empathy somewhere in their dark and crispy souls. And I don’t live in the middle of nowhere. Cars filled with people pass up and down this street, and not all of them are neighbors. Surely, they’ll report something to someone.

Even if they don’t, what will ultimately happen? Death? But what is death now? It doesn’t mean what it used to, not when Helen lies collapsed and dying atop me, a wilting flower.

Helen—my house—is the closest thing to a wife and a lover that I’ve known. I thought we’d be together our entire lives. I worked at home so I’d never have to leave her, and even went so far as to move her twice, once cross country, when I felt a change of scenery might do her good.

I just wish I’d had the sense to consummate our love. I bathed in the dark, dressed in the dark, all because I wasn’t ready to show her my nakedness. I needed coaxing from my shell in order to blossom into an openly sexual being, but, being a house, Helen could do little to aid my transformation.

Now, I may never transform. I don’t think the reality of this has sunk it yet, but it will. I’ve just got to give it time, and then I’ll realize how the ghosts of my upbringing have won the battle and prevented me from ever achieving true union, and thus true happiness, with Helen.

My parents insisted, for years and years, that loving non-humans was wrong. They said the thing they worshiped (that-thing-which-may-or-may-not-be-God) would surely look upon the consummation of our love with eyes of fire.

Learning that they felt this way came as no surprise; they never treated my childhood home with respect; they didn’t love it or feel its inner passageways like I did. Dishes were left in the sink for days. The floor was never swept, and months passed before newspapers were discarded. Mom worried constantly. She worried about her house and she worried about Pounce the cat. She worried about the weather and she worried about what she was going to cook for supper, and what she would watch on the television afterwards. Late at night, she worried that people with nebulous grudges against her were sneaking into the house when everyone was asleep. Dad was distant, if not unapproachable.

Sometimes, when I’m near sleep, I’ll have night terrors. I imagine I’m back at my old house, and the ghost of every burp and the spirit of every fart are trapped forever inside its walls. They taunt me and glide over my things, making them smell like old, dead farts, a smell only I can smell.

Once, I asked a teacher at my elementary school if she’d ever smelled the farts, perhaps at her place, but she just looked at me weird and, in less than a week, had me transferred to the developmental classes where I was forced to mingle with the diseased and the retarded until I left high school.

I have not and will never fart inside my house. Though I imagine that I fart less than most people, I must nevertheless fart every so often. So, when I feel wind gather inside me, I run out onto the lawn and expel gas where Helen doesn’t have to smell it, or be haunted by its undying ghost.

I hate that I must defecate in her, but the neighbors started complaining—as they are wont to do—whenever I shat in the yard. I always did it under the cover of night, holding matter in my bowels until it got tight and impacted, so I have no idea how they saw me, unless they were waiting for me to come out, or had cameras trained on my yard at ungodly hours.

Ultimately, I ascertained the one way to assuage both parental and neighboral guilt: make it legal and marry the old gal. (My house is 81 years young.) I felt reactionary thinking this way, but if it took that to make me feel comfortable in Helen’s love, then reactionary I would get.

Two nights ago, I drilled a hole in the wall by the bed in preparation for the honeymoon scheduled to commence the moment everything had been sanctioned by—or at least brought to the attention of—a higher authority. No priests or preachers or teachers or rabbis were to perform the ceremony, though. It’d be between Helen, that-thing-which-may-or-may-not-be-God, and me.

It was going to happen at 6:30 this evening. I even called my parents to tell them of my plans, though I had no intention of offering invites. I just let them know that my life of sin would soon be over because Helen and I were to be married, and, after that, they could enter my house without fear of heavenly reprisals or feelings of remorse for their lost and wayward son. They didn’t say anything substantial. Mom just sobbed on the phone while dad farted in the background.

I put down the receiver and realized, at that moment, that I didn’t need their approval. I’d never been lost and wayward; Helen and I had never lived in sin. If anyone, it was my mother and father living in sin, in a passionless and sexless union.

Still, I was unable to use the hole until things were official. I told myself that it was the fear of my own body and not feelings of guilt that held me back, realizing that to harbor guilt would be to admit that my love for Helen was wrong, which would only vindicate my parents' opinion of our relationship. I refuse to give them that satisfaction. I refuse to let them steal my joy.

But what if they were always right, and I always wrong? I’ve been thinking—being trapped in bedroom ruins, at the very least, gives one time to think—and wonder if I deserve this. Maybe our love is Satan-born and that-thing-which-may-or-may-not-be-God is cursing my house and me, cursing us with death.

No, that's crazy. I’ve got to get hold of myself. But I can’t. It’s too easy to regress and feel guilty, empty, scared, horrible, and dead. My body is a temporarily filled chamber that’s too easily vacated. It’s hollow—like a reed or a lute, and feels sucked clean, all sticks and bones bound by dry meat.

Maybe it’s karma. Admitting this is painful, but I scarred Helen once; really scarred her, I mean, physically and emotionally. No relationship is perfect, but what I did was unthinkable.

That day, I sensed Helen was in a pissy mood. I swept her floors eight different times, beginning at eight different start-points and traveling along eight different vertices on eight different angles, yet none of these things seemed to please her. Eventually, I could take no more. I ran to the kitchen, brandished a knife taken from the sink, and stabbed her walls, stabbed them twice.

That happened exactly two years, three months, twenty-seven days, four hours, twenty-three minutes, and six seconds ago. Perhaps I’d done worst things, but THE STABBING OF HELEN—(I think of it in all uppercase letters)—is the one event that sticks in my mind and makes me feel rotten to the core, like a foaming animal or dried out stump. I wish I could fashion a whip studded with fragments of soft drink cans; I’d lash myself with it. I imagine myself doing just that—desirous of hundreds if not thousands of cuts—but the first imagined lash hurts like a mother. It takes all I’ve got to imagine a second.

Imagining a third is impossible.

Kevin L. Donihe does not eat chimpanzees. In addition, he is the author of the Bizarro novels Shall We Gather at the Garden?, Grape City, The Greatest Fucking Moment in Sports and Ocean of Lard, the latter of which was co-written with Carlton Mellick III. Donihe is also the editor of Bare Bone, a series anthology published by Raw Dog Screaming Press. Read more about him at his official website and myspace page.