The House

I don’t remember when the front window cracked

                                                                                                   Maybe it was his cavernous voice

I don’t remember when the walls turned yellow and the floors a viscous gray

                            Maybe it happened when I was sleeping or writing

Maybe it was the way he saw the color cherry

                                                      In endless flames

I don’t remember when the bedroom door handles became flimsy and unreliable

Slippery slope

                             Maybe it was when I asked him to move in

                                                                                              His body sweaty, heavy, ready to take

The house had fought back and lost

I do remember the first hole in the wall, next to the backdoor

And the continuous broken TVs in the green bin, not the blue

                                                                                   “I’ll fix it, I’ll fix it,” he sang in cuckoo clock

             Turns out the hole is now colored gunmetal gray, but the crater lives there still

The second series in the form of broken portals

                                                                                                In his rage, there were cracked doors

Every door: ruptured

                                                Every rupture: scary stories with endless chapters

                                                                                                                               The bangs were loud

                                                                                                                                             Heavy-footed

                                                                                                            Boom, boom, boom, up, up, up

 

                                                     Chokey Chokey Chokey

                                                                                          Boom, boom, boom, down, down, down

                                                                                                                                     silence

The flood came after

                                           There was water everywhere

The house was drowning

A green pump in our local hardware store and the house didn’t even say thank you

The house didn’t speak

                                                                                                          The man didn’t speak

                                    three times in a span of two months

                                                 doubting my efforts

                                                              Was I doing enough to survive?

   flipped over a few times as the house regurgitated its last efforts of trying to breathe

                                                                               crouched down to cry in a corner

                                                               In delusion, I begged for my mother

                                                               I began to see the house as mother

It wasn’t the house I had bought with the polished, lustrous, new house smell

There was no fancy rainfall nozzle

                                                                                    beyond fractured because it wasn’t healing

                            no amount of plaster or drywall could hide what the house had become

The realtor’s eyes were not shocked to see the infrastructure falling apart

                                                                            She lived it herself

                                 She gave me a laundry list of remedies, but none better than:

                           “remain no contact, tell your mom, and give this house a paint job”