SMOKE HOUSE
Nights at home now the house sat wordless, so still the mother could not sleep. The bed cramped small and dirty; the air above her suffocating. The mother in her nightgown, tight, worn ratty where she rubbed her fingers in worry circles. She got up and left her husband crimped with his back toward her on the mattress and went downstairs. She went through the kitchen stuffed full of flowers, long rotten, stinking. She went into the son’s room where plastic sheeting covered the holes the fire had burned. The pinned laminate tacked in short sheets over the studs to keep the outside out or inside in. There was no wind. Outside, the earth lay parched and cracking. The trees enfolding over black lawns. The sky only ever one dumb color.
The mother stood in the exact center of the son’s room, or what remained of it. The room could be divided into halves: here, from the window to the far corner, where the walls were smudged and plaster dappled and the scorching sat upon the air; and here, past the window to the closet, where much of her son’s stuff sat untouched: the shirt he’d slept in every night since he was ten; the blanket the mother had sewn for him while he was still inside her; the trombone he begged for and never played. Each item encoded with his touch.
Before the son had moved into it, before they’d had a son at all, the burned room had been the master. In that room they’d made the child. He’d been a glimmer in their flat lives. A thing mistaken in the mother as a tumor until the infant sledded out, unbreathing. They’d nearly given up, and now this light. They’d had another child not long after: a thin-skinned daughter, soft of bone, another error no less loved. The house could not contain them. They’d built a new room on the upstairs. The son had taken the old master, where fifteen years later, the air would burn.
They could have let him have the newer room instead.
They could have built several rooms — halls and halls and on forever.
The son could still be with them now.
So many nights the son had come through the house sleepwalking, knocking pictures off the walls. Sometimes he’d stood before her naked, cut with muscle; the look in his eyes blasted, vacant, as she guided him back to bed.
The mother’s back ached. Her throat was dry as outside, wracked with unseen lesions, rheum. She lay down on the blackened carpet, the stink of old smoke hung around her head. She writhed and rubbed against it, smearing soot along her neck, her gown, her hair.
Upstairs the father watched the ceiling. He’d faked deep slumber through his wife’s long sobs. Another night. He knew he should touch her but he didn’t. He could not find a way to spread the intent through his body. He heard her fumble in the ill light. He kept his body fully flexed — mocked in the language of unconscious. She closed the door softly behind her. She’d always been considerate. She’d always kept measured ways around him, despite his caw, despite his bitching. He’d never figured out exactly how to express certain things — just saying them seemed too cheap.
Above the bed there was a skylight which when the room was designed had seemed ideal. Endless slumber under moon glow. An eye into the night. Instead the portal proved offensive — the sun’s angle woke him every morning. It let unwanted modes into his sleeping. He dreamt of black stars exploding in his cheeks; strange figures crawling through his veins behind his forehead; shit spurting from his pores. He’d covered the opening with foam rubber, causing the room to glow at a slight mute. The bed absorbed an aura. At dusk, the sheen of glass would reflect his head back at his eyes. The eyes were always open when he saw them, waiting until he nodded off. Always there. Another self. Finally one night while sleeping he’d stood with his feet sinking in the mattress and banged the glass out with his fists until he bled. Now they slept in open air.
In bed alone, the father thought of when he’d tried to teach his son to shave. How the child refused to let him help. How the son had cut his cheek so deep it spurted on the mirror. His son there screaming, face meat covered in white foam, blood sluicing and mixing with the lather; son screaming at the father to go away. That bathroom, where years before, when it was just them, he’d held the mother in the mirror, making four.
The father shuddered on the mattress, wanting a way to lie that would keep his back and neck from crimping, a configuration in which he could finally click into deep sleep, deep enough to maybe never wake, while in the ruined room below him, his wife wallowed in rhythm, just the same.
The house had caught on fire seven times in seven months. Each time it had ignited in a new location, if contained:
1. the downstairs foyer, where the family’s portrait hung, a value-bought multi-pack, the same shot the Dad kept crumpled in his wallet, and the daughter scratched with marker, hid in a drawer;
2. inside a kitchen cabinet (the kiddie plates had stunk for weeks, their neon gobs still globbed in puddles, the countertop all warped);
3. in the backyard, where several pets were buried, as were other things of which the family did not know;
4. along the rooftop and through the attic, ruining several unmatched heirlooms and their plastic Christmas tree, made black;
5. in the washroom dryer, ruining all the clothes the father ever really wore;
6. in the guestroom closet, empty;
7. around the son.
Each time the house had glowed in brief fury under the canopy of night. Always under star strum. Always while they slept.
The parents wanted elsewhere. They could not afford to move before they sold the house. They could not sell the house. Each potential buyer who came for viewing left with a strange look on their face. The insurance company sent inspectors who could not determine a clear cause of the frequent combustion. Other buildings had caught fire in the local area from the dry weather, but none so many times as theirs. The insurance company had placed their file under review. Some people used the term bad fortune. The mother’s mother said into the phone, Y’all aren’t living right.
The mother could not understand what had changed. They’d lived in the house for twenty years. They’d never once had a problem, but now the roof creaked, and the fires. The mirrors came loose in the bathrooms and fell forward, smashed to bits. The carpet curled up around the corners exposing the smooth green speckled foam beneath. There were often sounds of creaking, louder and more violent than the normal settling of a house: sounds of bones in fingers breaking, something crumpled promptly growing old.