by Nicholas Rys
In this house the walls keep moving. They expand and contract and have grown a skin. The windows swell and hallways pulse carpet blood. I roam this house but never penetrate rooms. I’m always succumbing to secret passage ways and boiler rooms and tricycles down hallways painted in exquisite symmetry. I’m flaking like paint off wooded window frames, flowing through plumbing and leaking out faucets when you think the water is turned off. I’m dripping through ceiling cracks and coughing attic fantasies while rats nest and gnaw insulation. I’m tingling with electricity and permeating patterned pulses.
I will try to break in and destroy this house from the inside; to tear out the bowels and infiltrate the basement, but it is doubtful. I’m outside intuiting it all; allowing the vibrations to wash over me. I’m lying on the lawn, grass slick on our skin. You will pick at the roof and knock gently on the backdoor as I search for stairs but only find window frames.
(lately I’ve been harvesting daylight and storing it in bottles like time. I’ve been drinking it in evenings when it’s dark and I cannot find my eyes. It opens me like an orchid)
You nudge my arm and say that’s enough. You say it’s time to go in but I’m not done surveying everything. I’ve made plans to circle like a vulture and bring you with me. I say I want to lick your wounds some more. I say not yet. You say something about endings or beginnings but I can’t remember which or what’s the difference.
Nicholas Rys lives in Yellow Springs, Ohio where he writes and makes music. His cultural essays, reviews and interviews have been featured in places like Hobart, Fanzine, PANK Entropy and Electric Literature. His fiction and poetry have been published in Witch Craft Magazine, Deluge, Maudlin House, Literary Orphans and many others. He is an active member of the Johnstown, Pennsylvania-based arts collective and archive, My Idea of Fun, through which he releases music under the moniker Norma Desmond.
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