Endings

The house was still standing. A little ways down the street there was nothing but ashes waiting for families to come claim them. It was a week after the storm that destroyed everything on the island. It's usually water that puts out a fire, but the water mixed with electricity and helped start these fires. Some houses remained, but they could not be saved. The ocean had seen to that. Today only a few lonely spirits drift through the wreckage. The old neighborhood is a ghost town.

I am one of the ghosts returning to haunt this place. The door does not want to open. The floors and carpets are swollen with flood water resisting any intrusion into the property it had claimed. Inside is stale and musty. The walls wear a black moldy band about four feet up like a black armband worn in mourning. Once a thriving life filled these rooms, but now the house is a bloated, rotting corpse.

The living room is covered with warped photo albums as if the house tried to take one last look back. Wrinkled, bent, and smeared, the faces smiled out of those photos, and the past, never knowing what lay in store for them. They stick together while everything else falls apart.

The china cabinet built in the garage during those early months of marriage, lay in ruins in the dining room. The fine dining ware it housed, and we never used, was smashed. I flipped it over and found it gutted. The drawers ripped from its belly leaving a gaping emptiness where the silver had been. The scavengers had been here.

These houses are carrion to the scavengers of the city who feel no remorse taking advantage of broken lives. They come in and steal just when we are struggling to find things to help put the old life back together. It is hard to decide whether it would be better if the house had been lost to the sea instead of being drowned and left on the beach to be picked apart.

Out the window, I can see a family from years ago playing in the sand and splashing in the waves. The water that lulled them in with its beauty. The ocean that hides its true face behind the smiling white caps. Salty water that will suck a person down in an instant or slowly eat away at the foundations of a home. Water is a fundamental need for survival, but that water outside the windows is unfit to drink. There is only death in that water, no matter how it tries to hide it.

The door to the basement squeals in protest as it is pulled open to reveal whatever dark secret it hides. The bottom four stairs lie hidden under three feet of dirty water. My wife cleaned the blood and sweat of life out of our clothes in that basement and now this murky water had returned as a physical manifestation of the dirty past I thought had been washed away long ago. I tell myself the stench of basement rot is what brings tears to my eyes as I stare into the dark abyss.

I return to the front room and kick around the wet piles of furniture. Particle board garbage that seemed strong enough, but turned to mush when hit with a real crisis. This is my life now, stuck to the bottom of an old rubber boot.

I test the stairs. They seem strong enough, but I still walk lightly on the sides where I hope there is more support. All I've got left is my health--that's what they say anyway--so I don't want to go risking that too.

Upstairs, everything is gone. Beds. Dressers. Even the linens. Everything the scavengers put value on is gone, but they left the real treasures: the smiling faces in the photos. The bedrooms are now rooms in a museum, existing only to showcase what is on the walls. Those pictures remind me of bugs trapped in amber. They look so alive except for the yellow hue that reveals the truth.

The window in the master bedroom is open. A breeze brings in the clean fresh air off the ocean. I close my eyes. There is no mildew, mold, or rot while standing in front of this window. For a moment, I forget myself and smile just a bit. This is why Doris would never leave this place.

It's time to find the door and get outside. This is no longer home and it won't be good to be here when Doris returns with whatever rat she is with now. I grab our last picture with Tommy and walk through the door. That life is gone and those people don't live here anymore. Outside the air is rancid with the decaying remains of this neighborhood and the ocean behind it.