Conventions of a House of God

CW: Violence, gore, abuse and references to suicide

The home is gone long before its infrastructure.

The day of the funeral is oppressively hot. Even in the evening, the sun refuses to ease its brutality. Every person that crowds around the coffin is coated in shiny sweat that makes their clothes uncomfortably soaked. It distracts them from the dead woman.

The heatwave takes priority in their minds– it’s much easier to worry about their hands or the tips of their noses getting sunburnt than the inevitability of their own bodies being in a similar box one day.

It is quiet aside from a few sniffles and a few teenagers sighing every few minutes; they wish they were riding their bikes or smoking cigarettes at the playground or anywhere that is not here. I cannot blame them. If I weren’t being closely observed by the attendees, I would have walked over to one of the kids and asked them for a cigarette and a lighter for myself.

My mother was not a perfect woman. She was often miserable.

The seat across from the coffee table kept her indentation. She would recite the Bible over and over, a voice like pummeled gravel. She would show up in my dreams, repeating verses in my ear.

I found myself frequently gathering empty bottles of whiskey around the house and cigarette butts that accumulated beneath the cushions. Her funeral succeeded in making everyone in attendance feel the same thing she felt in life: dismally trapped and in desperate need of a stiff drink.

“I am so sorry for your loss.”

“She was such a good woman.”

“Are you going to be alright?”

The condolences rolled over me like waves in an ocean, slipping through my fingertips before I really absorbed them. Townspeople are always more kind to the dead than they are to the living, this was obvious. When my mother was alive they would avoid her gaze in the local store or the gas station, hoping that she wouldn’t strike up any conversation that ended in one of them angrily storming off.

Just like her God, she did not hold back on judgments. They were an extension of herself. Every cell in her body was programmed to lash out like a rabid dog trapped in a corner.

When I returned to the house I had grown up in, it felt as hollow as it had since my mother died. There were no noises in the single-story structure aside from my own breathing.

I had trained myself as a child to make my steps imperceptible. I knew the sound of each floorboard, and placed my socked feet on the silent ones. Perhaps I believed stepping on those that made noise would awaken my mother’s ghost.

I moved as quietly as possible. I have always been a diligent child.

The house had always been spectacularly mundane. It is what I imagine every human’s house to look like– because I have never seen the inside of anyone else’s home.

My mother’s house is small in its structure and appearance: a couch and a chair sits in front of the miniscule fireplace in the living room. The kitchen is just enough for one person to cook simple foods, a responsibility that often fell onto me.

The sink overflows from the dishes I cannot bring myself to wash. Every time I walk up to try, my hands shake violently and I quit in order to save the plates from shattering.

In one corner, the door that leads to my mother’s room stares at me ominously, daring me to enter. I don’t wish to smell her perfume or feel the fabric of her clothes on my skin. I want her–every single part of her–to remain with her in that casket.

I wish her memory did not linger in the house that I must now inhabit without her.

After the funeral, I walk directly to my room. I take off all my clothes and flop onto the bed so my face collides with my old, thin pillow. The sheets absorb my sweat and I groan at the thought of having to wash them because I was too lazy to shower beforehand. The walls seem to inch towards me, trying to encapsulate me within. I feel them pressing into my ribs until it is hard to breathe.

I am in a cocoon with no energy to transform into a new entity. I just want to sleep.

So I do.

She visits me in my dreams.

I can smell stale smoke and hear her rough voice hissing in my ear. I see the house situated in the middle of a vast field of burnt grass. I walk for miles until my soles bleed. The structure never seems to get any closer.

I begin to run. My ankles shoot pain up my calves with each step.

The house mocks my agony.

I watch as a fiery blaze takes over the house I grew up in, burning its way from the inside out like a disease. The windows splinter and melt. The front door that was once a pristine white turns an ashen black.

Someone is screaming inside, a sickening sound that makes my stomach churn and distracts me from the pain for a few moments.

I fall to my knees. It is a familiar position. The skin there immediately burns.

The ground is trying to devour me, but my eyes cannot stray from the house. It is wilting, no longer resembling the place I know better than the palms of my own hands. The screaming gets louder, a shrill siren that demands my ears to listen and remember.

“You little rodent,” I hear her voice right behind me, above me, below me all at once. She could be speaking through my own vocal cords and I’d be unable to tell. “I can’t believe you outlived me. You get to live in my house while I rot.”

No, that can’t be right. She would never blame me for living longer than her– no mother would. The death of a child is any mother’s worst nightmare.

“Where did you get that idea?”

Her haunting laugh echoes against every blade of grass. The spit I gulp down has a distinct taste of copper.

“I love you,” I whimper.

Tears roll down my cheeks and drip onto my hands. When I look down, I see only bones. I cannot hold up my skeletal frame without muscles to aid me, and I fall over so my spine digs into the dirt beneath me.

The sky changes from a brilliant blue to a pool of crimson. It descends toward me, and I remind myself of the ancient paintings depicting divine suffering. Heat licks at my skull, and all I can think to say is: “I miss you, Mother.”

“Child,” I hear the familiar ice in her snarl. “I can’t say the same.”

I feel myself ignite. My sight goes blurry until I fall into a void as dark as ink. Heat overtakes me until I am something that no longer exists.

I wake up screaming my lungs raw. I cough aggressively over the side of my bed, feeling something crawl up my throat and into my mouth. Reaching back behind my teeth, I grab hold onto the end and slowly pull it out.

I feel it drag along my throat and gag. Once it passes my tongue, a long blade of grass hangs limply between my fingers. Drops of blood are smeared against the green stem. I turn it in my hand in deep confusion.

Of course she wouldn’t miss me or love me in death. That would require her ever doing either of those things while alive, which I was never foolish enough to believe– though not for a lack of trying.

I must find a way to adapt to a life where I don’t have to calculate each step, each word, each action that I take. How does one simply live without fear biting at your heels like a diseased animal with a scent for meat?

I fill up a watering can in the kitchen sink.

All is done in silence.

I can’t bring myself to make unnecessary noises, no matter how sure I am that my mother is dead. She can no longer hurt me if I speak or move too loudly. I watched her coffin be lowered into the ground, but a part of me feels her presence in every surface I touch, ready to strike out and punish disobedience.

The watering can is heavy and the water sloshes out onto the wooden floors. They needed to be mopped anyways.

A few nights after I had seen her dead, I had raided her alcohol cabinet like the rebellious teenagers I had once read about in an old newspaper. Of course, while they had done so at a party downtown that resulted in a drunk accident with a death count of two, I had read under lit matches late into the night. When my head had gotten foggy I had poured an entire beer onto the floor. In my head, I told myself it was for my mother. I bet she was very thirsty down there in Hell. I wondered if the Devil would spare some liquor for a woman like her.

When I woke up–passed out on her chair with pages of the Bible ripped all over the floor–I cried for hours, scrubbing at the floor with a dirty rag. The bleach rubbed my fingers raw: red and splotchy and dotted with specks of blood.

The plants around the house had already begun to wilt since her death. Their green leaves tinted yellow and brown made my chest hurt. I was failing them. It was she who had kept them alive, and now they kissed death.

They were cursing me in their own botanical language. One reserved for the enemy of flora.

“I’m sorry,” I apologize softly into the petals of a dying tulip, pouring water into its soil. “I’m trying. This is all my fault, I know. I’m sorry.”

A month later.

The plants are miraculously still alive. All throughout the windowsills they greedily gobble up the sun and the water I routinely feed them.

I am also miraculously still alive, considering the nightly nightmares that try to crush my lungs. My mother infests my dreams like incessant mold in an old building.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the doctors found fungus growing in my bone marrow. I scarcely eat or leave my bed; my duty to my mother’s plants does not extend to my own body.

The house continues to feel like an entity of its own.

A week after the funeral, I awoke to blades of grass peeking out from between the floorboards. When I tried to pull them out, they had regrown by the end of the day.

Two weeks after the funeral, a massive crack appeared in the kitchen wall, breaking the painting of the last supper that hung there. I couldn’t bring myself to take down the frame, though the eyes of Jesus Christ followed me when I paced around.

I could have sworn that once, I awoke on the couch in the middle of the night even though I remember falling asleep in my bed. In my confusion, I looked around with bleary eyes. When they had focused, every disciple’s eyes were glaring straight at me. Where Jesus once stood, I saw my mother in the clothes she had died in. Her eyes were wide and streaks of blood slid down her cheeks. Her teeth were bared at me like a hungry lion.

The next morning, I found the painting that my mother had hung up a decade ago face down on the floor.

I don’t understand what it wants from me, this house.

Does it want me to leave? I have nowhere else to go, and I can’t remember a time when I spent more than a night away from here that wasn’t due to a hospital visit.

The plants have completely altered their course of action from death to living excessively. Their vines slither up the walls like snakes. I know they’re alive from the way they whisper in the night. They are indomitable. Their leaves sway in time with me in mocking movement.

They haunt me just as my dreams do: creeping without warning, waiting for my guard to drop so they can wrap around my throat and squeeze.

“How are you, darlin’?” The woman at the register barely glances at me as she speaks, taking the money from my hand. She expects a response, and my purpose in life has always been to please.

“Fine. And you?”

“Oh you know,” she laughs. “Same old, same old. Am I right?”

A chuckle leaves my lips and tastes poisonous.

I tell her I won’t be needing a bag and take the matchbox. Her hands are rough with callouses. The ring finger of her left hand has a tan line where a ring should be and her nails are all bitten down to nubs.

“You sure you don’t want some cigarettes? They pair well with a bit of fire,” The woman in front of me winks. She is a kind woman.

My mind flashes: how would my life have turned out if she had been my mother instead? Would she hug her child when they cried? Would she threaten to break a child’s feet if they stepped too carelessly on noisy wood flooring? Would she haunt me?

I shake my head.

The woman gives me a knowing look. Her name tag says Joan.

I wonder if she is loved. I wonder if she cooks for a family, or if she goes home to an empty house. Does that house haunt her? Does the dust seep into her pores? Do the plants in her house threaten to suffocate her in her sleep?

“Take care of yourself, kid.”

For the first time in my life, I intend to.

This house is no longer mine. I think it was never mine to begin with.

The walls are beginning to rot from the inside. The smell of decay emanates from crown moldings. You can scarcely see through the vines that have overtaken the structural integrity of the house. I believe the plants seek revenge for my mother’s death.

“It was an accident,” I begged them to understand one night, on my knees once again. “It was an accident, I swear it! I didn’t mean to! I wanted her to stop…I just wanted her to stop.”

They don’t listen, and grow increasingly dense around me as the days pass. I am lucky that they have not mutated themselves to spew carbon dioxide into the air.

Tonight, I hold two boxes of matches in my hand. Every pillow in my mother’s home is laid out on the floor in front of me. I light match after match after match, flames licking my fingertips as I bend down to hold them to different objects.

The plants groan and sigh in my ears. I once feared that they would die. Now, I am counting on their deaths to bring me peace. To sustain me. To complete me.

A genuine laugh bubbles in my chest with each match that I throw across the house. One of them is powerful enough to set half of the kitchen wall on fire; it had fallen in the crack of the wall and sparked the rot aflame. The floorboards slowly become a molten lake.

This, I think, should be enough.

I snatch a bottle of whiskey from a cabinet that is half ablaze and wrap my knitted blanket around my shoulders. Running outside, I can’t help the giddy giggles that escape me.

I hear sirens in the distance–a faraway neighbor must have sent for help.

They are too late.

That house was never my own. This is what I try to explain to the officers that hoist me up from the ground, soot and ash clinging to my burned skin.

That was her house, her picture frames on the wall, her furniture, her floors, her kitchen, her food, her life. This was her life, and I have destroyed every last artifact of it.

The first time I had killed her hadn’t been enough.

I fought against her tight grip on me and took her pistol in my hands. I had looked over her sleeping body. I had leaned over and lined up the barrel to her left temple and pulled the trigger, watching the blood splatter on the hideous wallpaper. I had wrapped her still-warm fingers around the weapon.

Suicide.

“You ruined my life,” she used to say. “I’d end it myself if it wasn’t the sin of a coward.”

But that night, I had wondered: if my mother could so easily and frequently commit the sin of violence against innocents, who would doubt that she would sin once more?

It was not enough for her to die. Her memory must die with her. As the house burns before my eyes, and the screaming of the plants and wood and police officers fill my head, I realize I have finally done so. It is over.

Her house no longer stands.

Its foundations crumble and slam into the dirt beneath it.

She no longer plagues my dreams.

Her voice finally quiets.

The plants are ashes.

They turned against me, and I returned the favor.

The rotting wood has turned to carbon.

I would rather live in a concrete prison cell than ever see wood again.

It is finally over.

Is it?

She is finally over.

Isn’t she?

I am finally free.

I pray this remains true.