It’s Not A House, It’s A Home
All my friends are famous – Pitchfork princesses and Seattle nomads, dusty heirs and golden-mannequin puppeteers. Everyone is sprawled out like Persian rugs in the living room. Eyes on me, they ask questions they’re dying to know the answer to. The sun swaddles our bodies; we’re newborns. We sip our wine and our whiskeys, gin and Mezcal. I’ve got the perfect buzz. Someone hands me my guitar: a 1967 Silvertone Bobkat. It crackles like prison electricity. They ask me to sing to them, anything with a little jangle and reverb in it. I’m Jeff Buckley. They bring me buckets of tears, release their holy spirits from cages, watch them fly through the open windows of the house. Not a house, no – a home. They shake my hand and say, we never knew until now. They thank me for sharing this truth with them, because now they can see it. Truly see it. I hold each one’s heart, weigh it against my own. Everyone talks, laughs, makes out on my sofa.
The women with velvet hair want to sleep with me. Men with chicken grease abs, too. But I’m staring at the one I love most in the world. We’re dancing, smiling with lemons in our mouths. She hears my thoughts and laughs at my jokes and cries when I treat her badly. We have seventeen children, grown organically, grass-fed and free range. People say they look like the perfect combination of both of us. The kids have her creativity; they have my student loan debt. In her eyes I can see the future: we’re still dancing in this house (home). She whispers, I like it better in here. She asks, can we stay forever? I promise her.
Each room has a different creature, some with eyes for ears and some with no shape at all. They’re my brothers and my sisters. Mom and Dad share a bed. They never divorced. Never married, either. I introduced them. A skeleton plays the trombone on my marble staircase, asks me for a cigarette. I hand over a dollar. In my office, the demons play the angels in chess, loser buys next round. I meditate with Jesus and make taffy with the Tooth Fairy.
This isn’t real, the mirror tells me. You don’t belong here, it says. It slurps coffee from a paper cup, sounds like someone taking a plunger to a toilet.
I live here, I say. This is my home. The bathroom lights flicker honkytonk neon.
Consider yourself evicted, the mirror tells me.
My famous friends, my children, my monsters, Mom and Dad, the woman I love hurricane at the door. We need you, they shout.
The sink spews black water. I wash my face and brush my teeth. Outside, the air smells like rotten fruit and pennies. The windows won’t close. I eat a tablespoon of salted butter and drink flat beer, spill some on my clothes. A bird sings its song somewhere, past the building blocking the sun.
I wait for the world to explode.
D.T. Robbins is a writer living in Rancho Cucamonga, California. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Hobart, Spelk, Headway Quarterly, Bending Genres, and others. He’s also editor of the new literary journal, Rejection Letters. Sometimes he tweets at @dt_robbins and it could be worse.