'Kindling', by Esau McGowan
It smells of nothing in the new house. Even the storeroom huff of cardboard has passed since the recycling was picked up Tuesday morning. All of the boxes, carefully broken down and folded into the bin, empty of their contents, now begin their long journey towards becoming a box again. What had held all their earthly belongings might one day hold their cereal, or return to their porch like some wayward pet, but that is not quite right, for it would have to be a dead pet’s soul who returns in a new form, say an opossum who shows up every once in awhile, itself unsure of why.
Pond finds that interesting, the lack of smell, for the new house is not a new house. It has been lived in for years, by several cycles of occupants. Is there a spray, then? A device operating on a timer set in a central area with all interior doors open. Once the house has been fully vacated, and sealed shut, the device releases a cloud, sprays out a vapor that slowly fills the entire space of its container, seeping into all surfaces, not eliminating smells, but sealing them beneath a fine glaze, so that if she were to scratch at the surface, thereby breaking the seal, a whole world of scents would rush out? The seal could not be glossy. It would have to be soft and dimpled, more cotton than latex, so that new smells could be embedded on its surface, her smells and those of her fellow occupant.
She walks slowly about the four rooms of the house, studying their furniture and furnishings, appliances, objects of decor and entertainment, mementos, photographs and artworks, houseplants, lamps, rugs, and all the rest. Not a thing out of place. She is reminded of four logs balanced into scaffolding, the bones of a campfire set with intention but not yet burning. There is violence in every act of creation. She would like to set this fire burning without aid of starter log or lighter fluid. The concentrated small efforts of lighting a pad of dry moss, transferring the flame to a handful of leaves, to a bundle of twigs, kindling the flame without smothering it until it can light the larger logs, that is a labor conducted in a sort of concentrated time, a special zone she enjoys occupying. The kind of time that dictates a sporting event. She remembers playing soccer in high school, and living in that special time zone, if only for ninety minutes a week, but within that zone, what does ninety minutes mean? As little as does a week. She thinks maybe animals live in this place always, but then again what does she know of how animals live? She returns to that zone only rarely now. Sometimes, in the kitchen, when she is paying careful attention to the meal she is cooking. Those waiting for the fire to start are not included in the concentrated time and are liable to grow impatient, whether from cold or hunger, start their bickering about lighter fluid, drenching the logs and flicking a single match into the chemical pool. The climatic moment. The leap of flames. The crackling of the logs. There are hearths that can be started as easily as turning on the lights. And how easily things become easy as turning on the lights. Lighting a room used to connect one to it, or connect someone to something, right? The lighting of rooms is connected to the creation of Moby-Dick, at least, whatever that means.
Pond stops herself. She has taken to this habit of drifting about her own home, slowly running her hand over things, and thinking such goddamn melancholic thoughts. Carry on like this and she is liable to become a reactionary. Things change. Time marches on. There are new kinds of concentrated time. And if she had to light a fire every evening, it would no longer open up to her in that same way. We only see things for what they are a single time. After that, it is a concentrated effort to remember. She walks the rooms until she is in the kitchen where there is one more cup of coffee in the pot; she sloshes it into her mug, flicks off the hot plate, and sets the pot in the basin of the sink, then she steps out the backdoor, and onto their little enclosed porch above the backyard, and takes a breath of the late morning air. High clouds dilute the persistent moon. It appears blurry, as if it is trying to break through from somewhere else, but cannot quite manage it.
Their new neighborhood is built on a hill. From her porch she can see over the next row of houses and onto the last street before the river where there is a large truck slowing to pull into a driveway. Guys with big trucks tend to be obsessive parkers. It is kind of a cute quirk, for a demographic not often thought to possess many cute quirks. This truck joins a fleet of others already parked in the large driveway of a short-term rental. He maneuvers confidently into the driveway in his lifted 250. The noise of it makes its way all the way across the neighborhood. The other trucks, mostly Fords, but there are a couple Chevys and Japanese models, are parked around the circular driveway, each pointing as carefully towards the center as the increments on a clock. The driver backs into the 7 o’clock slot, pulls forward a bit, corrects his angle, and reverses again, locking perfectly into place. Pond watches him and a buddy exit the cab, one clasping a couple greasy, pink boxes, and the other balancing a few cardboard drink carriers, one atop the other.
Pond imagines they are gathered for a bachelor party, or some other sort of boys’ trip, and an unexpected pang of jealousy jolts through her. Would she like to be one of them? Loud and confident, crashing through life with balls of brass and loads of friends. Her mouth waters at the thought of the top-of-the-line coolers no doubt brimming with ice cold beer, and she dreams of mental oblivion in the cool waters behind the house. She sips her coffee as the donut-bearers disappear within the large house down the hill and then tries to get a handle on the day.
It is nearing eleven and she has done nothing but haunt the bedrooms of her new house. She sips her coffee even as she knows it is the last thing she needs more of. There are podcasts she could listen to, her book she could read, chores to be done, yet it all just seems so impossible. Her backyard is rather useless, a steep incline interrupted by a high wooden fence. How they will ever mow it, she cannot imagine. Let it grow wild, she thinks. Who cares, but Charlie will. He has talked about how he would terrace it, if they owned the place, but of course they do not.
Pond gets up suddenly and goes inside the house. She has not felt quite right since at least the day before. After work, she had fallen into a funk. In the evening, she took a meditative walk during which she tried to imagine she and Charlie were newly dating, and she was heading over to his house for the night; that she had her own quarters somewhere else. As she looped around the neighborhood, she tried to remember Charlie as he had been when they first met, and she imagined them sitting out on this back porch, which would have been more mysterious to her, under some lights, having a drink and discussing...the mental exercise fell apart as soon as she returned home, but she had been content enough to crawl into bed with him after some domestic chores, but that knot had been there again when she woke up, and she felt nervous and on edge, but also melancholy and listless.
Inside and not sure why, she goes down into the basement where at least it smells damp and a little earthy. There are sliding glass doors that open onto the backyard, directly beneath the little deck she had just been on, and she slides them open and steps into the yard. It is overgrown, but not abandonedly so. The incline is steep and sudden so that she must almost zig zag her way down it. It is a rather useless yard, she thinks again as she makes her way to the bottom of it and slumps down with her back against the fence and looks up at the house behind her.
Curled there, like a field mouse in its burrow, the house makes quite an impression. It looms over her, narrow and tall, and she so small against the fence, her feet before her, raised almost to the same level as her weepy eyes by the grade of the hill. She stares up at the structure basking in the morning light, and wills herself into a state of mind in which the house can be like a god, and then gets comfortable against the cool, damp grass, the hard fence behind her, an insect of some sort tickling her left wrist as it investigates her presence.
Photography by Stephen