The Dying House
Something thick and red has started to leak from the ceiling lights. There was a time when this house was alive, early in my life, but late enough that I do remember it. When it was freshly painted yellow, we spent afternoons spraying each other with the hose and swallowing rusty water, then drying off in the sun. We ran for the ice cream truck most days, scrambled for change, and cried at cones dropped on the ground. We lived in the house, and now we find ourselves dying along with it. Now it moans at night, and bleeds all day long.
It started with nothing too strange. Millipedes in the shower where they’d never been before, then large moths wherever and whenever we’d had enough creepy crawlies. Lights began flickering. No matter how many times the bulbs were changed. And the roof leaks and leaks, no matter how many times we patch it. I know we’re all too embarrassed to have company, insisting silently, to ourselves and each other and the world we are what you might call upper middle class. We just don’t show it, but rest assured we know exactly what we are––white collar white trash.
Lately it feels like I’ve been drugged when I stare into the bathroom mirror for too long, peeling paint on the once stark white frame. I find myself disappearing. I’ve seen my hands go transparent, and I feel certain it’s not just in my head. But I inevitably fall back onto the weathered orange hardwood, lost amongst mismatched tchotchkes set about the living room. Just when I begin to feel escape may not be far off, I force myself back to the pretty carved mantelpiece stained gray by fireplace smoke. Attempted cleaning left the lingering stain smudged all across the white wood. Dad tries to make everything look okay, but they never spend the money or time to redo any of the mess. They both say the kitchen is nice but it looks like 1999. Our silent, forever intangible dysfunction has soaked up into the walls, such that creaks and whisperings I’ve heard for years have turned inside out. Nighttime noises are no longer unintelligible. This house is dying, maybe even dead already, and it speaks to me as I fall asleep. It sounds like a sad man, a fruitless middle age. Sometimes an elderly woman. Either way, it’s usually too quiet to glean more than a few ringing words. The woman who lived here before us died in the house, but first let the place fall far into disrepair. At five years old, I wanted to move in regardless of the mold in the bathroom or yellowing carpet. I told my mother and father I wanted the house because there were seashells buried in the yard, just beneath the surface, peaking out of dry soil that I believe once housed a garden. Now I hear voices, and I smell perfume that does not belong to my mother. To be clear, I am only crazy within the walls of this house. And I’ve come to believe, might even say I’ve come to understand, that a place can be haunted in its very nature. Even in the absence of ghosts. I know from experience it’s perfectly possible to be haunted by oneself. This house, if I were to diagnose it, is a self-fulfilling prophecy. And there is something like blood crusted around the air ducts and switch plates.
I’ve been back living in the house again for almost a year. Shortly after I came back, the man next door died. Dad and I watched the whole thing unfold, nosey neighbors staring out the back door window hoping not to be noticed. It was late winter, New England winter, which is bitter. The police opened all the doors and windows, so we had to assume he’d been there for days. In two decades none of us had spoken to him more than a couple times. He never had visitors that we could see. No wife, no children. So his rotting body lay untouched in the house. Probably found by a house painter or electrician. And the smell was so bad, they kept the house open up to a twenty degree day. We waited until the coroner wheeled his body out in a bag, then into the back of a van, and speculated he killed himself but saw nothing in the papers. No vague obituary saying he died suddenly at home, or listing who survived him. So he might haunt our house too, because the line where our property ended and his began was always unclear. When I was little, he told me not to climb the trees on his side of the narrow woods separating here from there. And now, he may be one of a thousand reasons why the house is so cold, even in the summer, most notably by the back door window where we watched with rapt attention the aftermath of his tragic life and unremarkable death. But what lingers in my childhood home didn’t start with death, but life lived in regret. Every home becomes sentient given enough time.
I’ll be gone soon enough. I will not waste away in a drooping ranch house, rooms stuffed full and lawn bare. If my childhood has a chance of being saved, it must be rebuilt from the ground up. And then it must, absolutely must, be cleansed with sage and profuse apologies.
There are no apparitions, or glowing balls of light. But I feel, hear, and smell the memories that reside in this house. When I say it’s ugly, my mother says I’ve hurt its feelings. I take it back. I’ve told them so many times, I am very sorry. Sorry for the moaning and stumbling footsteps. For the books flying off the shelves. I am afraid to ask them if I’ve fabricated this whole thing.
Until I leave, which I keep promising to do, my childhood bedroom is my sanctuary, never moreso than on rainy summer nights with the window cracked, looking out at the little sprouts pushing up though the dirt of a flower box devoid of flowers. Beyond that, the most picturesque parts of a gnarled yard. Beyond that, a house in the backwoods of a well-to-do town, once owned by a dead man, whom we watched pulled out of his home this winter in a body bag, into a van, out my window. Lately, I’ve seen that the moths that first alerted me to the problem are dying. They lie still between the glass of the window and the screen to outside. Like flies in your average scary story. But this is different. This house has ghosts attracted to the light, to the backyard fires, and citronella candles. They are not bad ghosts, just as the house is not at fault for dying. My room feels different than it used to. It's been reincarnated several times since I first found it, and is now littered with remnants of the people I’ve been. Now, I am sure this house is nearly through its transition into spirit, and Mom and Dad will keep living in it anyway.
Kaitlin Flynn is a fiction writer and very proud New Yorker. She has been obsessively writing since childhood, but only decided to pursue her passion further after minoring in creative writing at NYU. She has had work published in Into the Void and Prometheus Dreaming, with upcoming stories in the Black Horse Review and The Ice Colony, and is currently working as a freelance writer while editing her first novel. Kaitlin is particularly interested in writing about trauma and the psychology of illness.