Houses & Homes, Pt. 3

The summer sun beat hard down on his upturned face as he mopped his brow with his shirtsleeve. The burning eye in the sky told him that it was noon and he plopped down on the slowly growing pile of wood next to him and lit a cigarette, closing his lighter with a small flourish.

The winter had been a long one, leaden with tears and heavy glances. She had not understood his epiphany, that the house they had built was built in error – out of a need for security more than a desire for satisfaction. She had screamed, cried, pleaded, thrown things at him, upturned furniture. In the end, he had been forced to drive her from the building and back to her parents' home, her pack and belongings slung over his own shoulders, her weeping being their traveling tune.

The rest of the spring was spent cataloging the nature and quality of the house. He didn't spend another night in its walls, but pitched a shelter on the edge of the woods and cooked his repasts over an open flame. Once the meticulous lists were completed and he was sure that he had learned every error and how it had come about, he began deconstruction; the first day of summer.

Plank by plank, nail by nail, pillow by chair, the house was torn limb from limb and thrown into a great pile. The burn in his arms was cathartic, the sweat on his brow soothing to his bruised mind. As the pile grew, so to did his satisfaction with this new-found life he was “building” for himself. Every board felt like a small revelation, the naked wood underneath describing the nature of all the falsehood he had inadvertently found himself believing. When the pile stood as high as he and the remains of the house little more than a skeleton of sun-bleached timber, he finally felt whole again.

Cigarette finished, he stood, took up his hammer in his belt, went back into the carcass. Climbing, monkey-like, muscles taut and straining, he ascended the structure to the apex and began the long – but last – step of disassembling the framework from the top, down. Overtaken by the fever of determination, he did not stop for rest or sustenance until he finished, leaving only the foundation posts in place. Two days he spent crawling over the final remains and he finalized the entire enterprise by hewing off the last posts at the base.

The garden had long returned to its natural state, as if it had never felt the touch of the hoe; the fence surrounding it had been removed and cast into the pile. The entire structure removed, the ground where it had once stood was now level and bare, the only visible evidence of its existence the expanse of dirt in place of the surrounding grass. The paving stones that had once made up the walk were pulled up and planted, on edge, in the earth around the pile, creating an uneven circle about it. The pile itself, meanwhile, had been carefully altered, with certain longer boards and pieces replaced so as to protrude out- or upward. On some of these poles, furniture was skewered. On others, blankets were stretched or other boards lashed. This final effort produced a horrific effect on the ramshackle monolith. It stood halfway between the woods and the empty plot, grinning insanely, an ominous warning to passersby of events unknown.