House

The woman lives in a declining home, a building that’s walls lean into the centre like the skin of an unpeeled orange. The floorboards of this home are loose, creaking and falling with one wrong touch. The woman leaps from safe place to safe space, memorised over the years, filling her mind with their nature, wiping away almost everything else.

She never leaves the house, and scratches on brick walls mark passing time and as she makes her way slowly through countless winding corridors. The whole house is lit by the glowing mosses littering walls and ceiling tiles with no gaps to see beyond.

Sometimes looking at walls makes her brain’s twist, squirm in her skull as if she is looking at something that shouldn’t be, shouldn’t turn her skull like a loose lemon spinning on a plate. She only screamed once, if this happened, before settling into trancelike, trancelike state. She is loose in one of these states now and the house watches her spin motionless on the fracturing floor.

But these walls and floors are growing tired of her, they are keeping her now out of habit rather than joy. They materialised her fruit without feeling. When she was new, they were always excited, observing and watching every move from her first steps as a wean all the way to seeing her dance across its surfaces. Now? Not a thing.

The woman is unaware of this, all she sees are melting walls and nothing, brain remoulding itself with each second as the walls enter her one last time, spinning her mind the same way she spins through the house in her endless walks.

Life goes on and she feels the house delve deeper than it ever has before, senses as it climbs to the back of her skull and drives her from its floor, pushing her along and down flights and flights of stairs into a deep room she has never seen.

It is dark; the moss does not grow here, and she cannot see, but still she is forced ahead, deeper into the house’s bowels. Things slither across her feet, coarse as they come, and now they are grabbing hold, pulling tighter and tighter.

She cannot struggle, she cannot move, she cannot scream. It is pulling harder and harder, her joints are breaking, her joints are coming apart at the seams and –

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

she wakes besides water, more water than she has ever seen.

Then, the screaming finally comes.