HOUSE

   

     “Nature comes through.”

     My dad walks ahead of me into the house. It is grown over with ivy and blackberry.  A feeling of dread and excitement - ecstasy - fills my body.

     Inside it is cool and damp feeling. The light through the windows, long bereft of glass, grows white hot as our eyes adjust to the deep shadows within.

     It is an old house, somewhere in the woods that take up a large portion of my grandfather’s property. My dad and I have come upon it while hiking.

     There are vines and branches growing through cracks in the wooden slats of the walls, and for the first time I start to comprehend the nature of walls. The blackberry cascades in through the windows and doors. Tree roots arch upward through the dirt floor and then disappear down, back below the ground. Their shape presents itself to my young mind as like the rough-scaled backs of the sea serpents in the artists’ drawings that I stare at in the pages of books for hours on end, at home in my bedroom.

     “Given enough time, nature comes through.”

     This is what my dad tells me when I ask him how this house came to be this way. To my young mind houses are things for living in. They are warm, safe, insulated from the outside. It strains my imagination to comprehend the fact that if left alone for only a few decades the walls and the roof and the thick carpet I’ve come to depend on could deteriorate to this. To me - six years old on summer break - this is a place of dreams. This is one of the dark places on the maps. It is the place where monsters are born.

- An excerpt from my previous novel, The Heat Death of the Universe, finished in 2006.