What was left

Posted on May 14, 2003 in Book of Days Prose Arcana

Note: This is twenty-seventh in a series based on exercises from A Writer’s Book of Days. It’s something of a rebellion against the Friday Five and similar tupperware content memes.

Today’s topic: Write about abandoned houses.

The windows looked like they’d been chewed out by the giant rat that crawled out of his dreams and sniffed about his toes while he slept. He wasn’t about to nibble at the cinder-block walls or touch his tongue to them. At six,he’d long forgotten the lusty hunger he’d had for dirt and Play Dough, the pica that brought him to swallow the wheels of his brother’s Matchbox cars.

He wanted to explore the house, not eat it. The lack of a roof took much of the pleasure out of it — anything open to the sky lacked mystery. There were no dark places where he could walk about, no closets holding skeletons — his mother liked to talk about the skeletons other people had in their closets — and since they didn’t have any, he was sad at this lost opportunity to find such a place, where he could take his first close look at the chalky framework that his brother told him kept every boy and girl from turning into a jellyfish.

What was left of the roof — curved Spanish tiles — lay in a mixed pile of plaster, clay, glass, and wood that added about the thickness of one hand to the level of the floor. He stepped through the front door warily and looked around. His feet crunched the ruin. Here, he thought as if he were narrating one of the tales in the rainbow of story books that his brother sometimes read to him, there be dragons. And spiders. And centipedes and pill bugs and lizards. And maybe — if he was lucky — something dangerous like a snake or a scorpion. With the tip of his sneaker, he lifted a shingle. An oil black beetle ran out, scurried across the floor. He leaned over to inspect it more closely. A popsicle stick, part tied to the debris by a velvety bit of spider lace, suggested itself as a prod. He picked it up and gingerly poked the insect in the rump. It raised it’s hind end, like a shotgun in the hands of a drunken hillbilly, and held it in defiance of Sean’s trespass. The warning was enough. Sean didn’t push it to see what it packed.

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Tomorrow’ topic/prompt: Write about a reflection.