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22.11.2008
Houses are especially hard to keep clean when you can’t find them. It was the voice from up the street in the unsoiled floral apron—not your friend at all, not someone who had ever condescended to speak to you before—who came to tell you the news, but she kept just behind your right shoulder the whole time she was talking, and her whispers were coded and hypocritical. You were turning around, trying to see her, when your eyes swept across your own address. The air had a fanged quality. It bristled with inverted rooms, with the gestural spines that might have indicated the path along which children circumnavigated the coffee table—when there was still a house there.
But it wasn’t entirely gone. A fist could still find something to puncture. The trouble might lie in determining what it had hit. Behind you, the spoiled bitch from the house with the white carpets got hung up on a single syllable. She probably intended it to be part of a longer word, but broken off like that, bleated like that, it could be easily confused with the name of your son. At last she got her sounds unstuck, rolled out coherent words, and it started to seem like maybe she was talking about him after all. You thought he was yours, she said, but if you’d been paying attention you’d have noticed that he smells very different now. At the same time there was a moist snuffling, then a pricking wetness on the back of your neck, and you had to bat her away. Was she really about to take a bite out of you?
I don’t have time for this, you told her. I have to get dinner started. You meant it as an insult, but you weren’t clear if the point got across to her. You still couldn’t see her, just feel the little pops of air squeezed out between her teeth.
In the pit where your kitchen used to be, you could hear someone else repeating the same words you’d used to get rid of the bitch—repeating them again and again in a rising cadence, delighted at the joke. But you couldn’t see who was talking. It was dark down there.