There is a House in the Field

Untitled Part 1

There is a house in the field. It is decrepit and abandoned and time has taken to it like nails to a chalkboard. The blue paint of its walls peels off like sunburnt skin, thin and molting in your fingers.

When you look up at the house—glimpse in through some of the dusty windows that haven't been smashed—sometimes you see things. Staggering feet amoung the bugs. A respirator. Toy cars on the floor and a tin of sustagen spewn out across the grimy floor.

The sun flays down on your back and you can feel the sweat on your forehead go cold. Your muscles suddenly stiffen. Blood vessels ruptured under the skin as the smell washes over you. Someone's house. That familiar smell. But rotted, gone sour somehow.

A dog starts to bark. The sound scuffing closer. A stub where it's tail should be.

You go and don't come back for a while.

The day you return to the house is chilly. Well, chilly in the only way the weather knows how to be—a blanket of down over your head and dew soaking your shoes and the sighing start of the wind as it ruffles your hair.

Today you have decided to go inside the house.

Your mum's been inside before. She's told you stories of armchairs facing walls and long-gone tin sheds taken back by the scrub. You wonder if the armchair's still there, and start forward to find out.

You enter through the little stone garage. Normally, you would have gone through the door, but the front doors were glass and they were shattered and boarded up a long time ago.

The garage is set under the house, and from where you stand, you can see the set of wooden stairs leading up to the main portion of the house. Beside you is a metal room, about three meters on all sides and empty save for the dust and a cobweb hung across the door-less entry like a banner. There is no spider, and you don't wonder where it went.

Instead, you walk forwards into the cool of the shelter. Your shoes make prints in the dust and, when you notice, a tiny part of you glimmers in relief that if your exploration were to be abruptly ended, there would still be a trace of you left. Not that you believe in those sort of things. You believe in squatters, but surely you would have noticed someone living here by now.

You walk past a dusty set of bins and a clutter of empty boxes as you make your way over to the stairs. They are hardly more than wooden planks, so you can see the little blue blanket tucked underneath the stairs, collecting dust. It's patterned with cartoonish stars and the name 'Zeke' is branded in all capital letters across the middle.

Briefly you wonder who Zeke was, or is, before you keep moving.

Upstairs, you're faced with a tiny kitchen, separated from the carpeted loungeroom by a dilapidated breakfast bar, the linoleum of which is moldy and faded.

The tiles in the kitchen are cracked and dirty. In some places little plants poke through, premature leaves catching bright in the afternoon sun.

On the bar is an opened jar of baby food and a spilt tin of sustagen, yellowed powder spilling over the counter onto the carpet below. There, a sprawling semi-circle of rusted toy cars and what looks like an oxygen mask but for a child.

Some of the kitchen cupboards are open and inside cereal boxes and canned tomato peek out at you from wooden doors swung open and swelled by the wind and rain.

You wander around the loungeroom. It's small, but homey. You look out the full-sized window on the far wall and look down at the rocks and red dirt and the straw of the grass. It's strange being on the other side of the glass.

It's strange standing in so much glass—shards of it thrown about the room like a splay of thick, clear cards whose edges had been ripped and chewed on. Looking at it tastes like cardboard in your mouth, corrugated against your teeth and spit gathering in your throat. You wonder why someone smashed the glass doors in the first place. Why the people who boarded them up hadn't even been bothered to clean the glass up, leaving it as chunks of ice and a fine sprinkle of dust across the carpet.

When the knot in your stomach toughens, you go to the next floor. The staircases are never more than a few steps—half rot, half dust—but they don't give way beneath your feet. You pause at the top and glance down from where you had come. A gaping blackness catches your eye. A hole in the wall above the steps, big enough to climb through. Looking into the dark makes you feel dizzy. It's absolute, almost choking, like moss in your lungs, like chalk on your tongue. You look away.

Where you are standing at the top of the stairs is an intersection. To your right is an open door into what looks like a bedroom. To your left a broken toilet beside the open entry to the bathroom. In front of you the entryways to two rooms. A sticker of a butterfly is stuck to the window opposite to you, inside one of the far rooms. It looks like it's made of stained glass—syrupy red and blue and yellow.

You go into the bathroom first. Moss replaces the grit in the tiles, stripes of green through the grimy checkered floor. The sink is cracked, the handles rusted to stone. The mirror is split in two and the brown backing peeks out at you from between the reflective shards. There is a chicken bone in the shower and the water doesn't work.

By the open doorway to the bathroom is a little cupboard like a pantry. It's empty, but you imagine it would be good for storage as it's big enough for a fully sized human to sit in.

The room across from the bathroom looks out of place compared to the rest. It's empty aside from the metal frame of a foldable bed in one corner, white paint chipping away to reveal dust and soot. The walls have been freshly painted, a deep cornflower blue like the sky on an empty summer day. The wall opposite to the doorway is completely glass from about halfway up. You walk over to it and the wooden floor feels rickety beneath your feet. You try not to mind it.

The window comes up to your hip, segmented by little black bars and showing the view of the empty valley. Rolls of dead grass. Clusters of trees, pale trunks pitted with burn marks, huge bristly bushes of leaves swaying in the breeze. Paths of red dirt scrubbed out by wandering animals, including yourself.

The sun comes out from behind the mask of clouds and, for a few moments, the whole world is painted lighter. Then it fades again, sun eclipsed by the slate cotton of the drifting clouds. Down in the field, your eyes catch a few magpies, pecking aimlessly in the dirt. You smile at them. Wonder where the dog went.

Next is the two last rooms. The one with the butterfly sticker is small, the single rickety bedframe only leaving a strip of floor to stand. The window isn't big either, only spanning a meter at most. It shows only the branches of a scrubby tree, a few winding branches ending in a splintered javelin—a scrawled epitaph written by ants etched through the wood.

The last room isn't large either. It's got another bedframe in it, rusted and white like the one from the room with the blue walls. The wallpaper is peeling and chalky and smells wet even from the doorway. On the rooms right is a flimsy cabinet and a chest of drawers. The cabinet, through big enough for you to stand in, is empty. The drawers, meanwhile, are not.

When you force open the top drawer, struggling with the scraping wood which had long forgotten how to move, there is a little dead bird, feathers matted and eyes gone. On the other side of the drawer, is a piece of dog feces, dried and black. You hear it roll when you force the drawer back closed.

In the second drawer is a grocery list—'milk, baby food, flower seeds, soap, Cornflakes'. It looks like it was written on the back of a receipt, but the ink on the other side is too faded to make out.

The rest of the drawers are empty, cloth lining stuffy with dust.

When you walk back down both set of stairs, you mull over things. You have a lot of questions but no answers. As you pass the bins, you wonder if that is a bad thing.

Before you go, you step inside the little metal room by the exit, ducking under the bare spider's web. Inside, your skin prickles, but you can't make out whether there was really a change in temperature or not. You decide maybe there was, since the room does bare resemblance to a cold room, despite how strange that seems.

After a minute, you give into the rash of goosebumps across your skin and leave the possibly cold room.

As your feet crunch down on the dead grass outside, you wonder whether you ought to ever go back into the house again. By the time you are home, you still aren't sure.