Splintered Boards
by Paulette Pierce
I’m washing my hands in the second-floor bathtub for the thirtieth time, and I’m thinking Sarah Winchester probably wasn’t crazy, she just knew old houses age fifty years every minute. You can’t keep up with the degradation unless you stick to a frenetic construction pace. Did the relentless symphony of saws and hammers rattle her brain until none of the pieces slotted into place anymore? Maybe the first Merzbow record was actually recorded in 1902. All hail Sarah Winchester, goddess of noise rock.
I bought this hulking Victorian only three months ago, but I am already certain it wants me to leave. Every sigh of weary floorboards is a widow’s moan, and lately, they’re less moan, more taunt. The second-floor lavatory fell apart when I tried to fix a clogged pipe, hence my bathtub predicament. One gentle pull, and the pipe disintegrated into fine sand. I didn’t know metal was capable of that. It was the ramrod spine holding everything in place, wood and granite caving inward like a failed soufflé.
“Look out!” Nino, the enormous foreman in overalls—acid-washed with turpentine and mineral oil, a lifetime of solvents and adhesives soaked into the denim—shouts at me as I come down the stairs. A lightbulb has burst. They tried to fix the loose connection on the landing, and now the floor is littered in jagged shards. They shine in the midday sun, and I want to gather them in my fist and squeeze, hold onto every breaking part of this house, use my blood as lacquer to fuse the pieces together. I read about kintsugi once, but I’m not sure I have it right.
A bird swoops in through the open window and pecks at the glass, tucking a few fragments underneath its wing and flying out again. I imagine its nest looks as wild as the floor it stole from; there are splinters curved like branches at my feet, shaved clean from the bones of wooden planks to patch the floor, nails and bolts and nuts and I don’t know what else, the jeweled centerpiece of razored glass still sticking up in the middle.
I don’t avoid the glass. I lift my bare foot and stomp down hard.
I do it again.
And again.
It turns into a defiant flamenco. I am reveling in ruin. I am no longer dodging and ducking like a svelte warrior trained to avoid the opponent’s every blow. I am leaning into the fists of discarded nails and unsanded boards that decorate the ground, a mélange of danger that used to feel like inconvenience, hair in the spaghetti of my lovingly crafted meal, but now it feels like this was what it was meant to be all along. I just couldn’t see it before.
Nino joins me, and we start doing the tango in the mess. It’s awkward because he’s nearly seven feet tall, and I’m five foot two on a generous day, but we make it work. The debris rises from the ground and snakes up my legs, scratching until it leaves blood trails; they climb and climb up my skin, vines that have no end. Nino’s overalls are torn into ragged shreds up to the knee, and I start to make a Freddie Kreuger joke because it reminds me of that scene with the girl thrashing in her sleep, her shirt opened in strategic strips, that marriage of blood and sex I never know what to do with, what it’s supposed to make me feel, but I never get the words out because he sits on the ground so hard, the floor breaks around him, taking me with it. We are on the first floor now, landing with a thunk in our jagged crash pad, dust raining down like fine drizzles of sugar, fractured boards above us, a halo of destruction.
Nino doesn’t say anything. He just starts eating the lightbulb fragments. The filament is perched on his tongue, and when he touches his fingertip to his temple, his skull lights up from the inside out. He looks like one of those glow worm toys, and he’s laughing hysterically until I am too. I plop down next to him on the dirty ground, dust grinding into my cuts until it stings, and I think of the time my grandmother put Bactine on a gash on my hand. It was in their old house, the first house I ever loved. I wanted so badly for this home to feel like that. I can still feel the twist and burn of the Bactine, an angry worm of a nerve winding its way through my hand. She blew on the wound to soothe it, but it only made it worse.
I pluck a strip of wood from the ground and chew on it. It’s not too bad. Beef jerky but drier. Like eating the beach until I’m desiccated from the inside out. Nino follows my example, picking through piles of nails like he’s searching for the one that looks tastiest. We’re gorging now, scooping everything up like children left alone in the ice cream shop, bleeding and laughing and screaming until we don’t understand why we started in the first place, what joy we were hoping to covet from the discarded remains of this place I’ve been trying so hard to claim. We’re deep inside a bacchanal, and once it’s open, you can’t put the stopper on the bottle of delirium.
The bird comes back, swooping down through the hole we made and lighting on the edge of our little accidental raft. She’s carrying her babies, one under each wing, nothing more than tufts of unruly feathers and eyes that haven’t yet learned how to open on their own. She puts them down in the middle of the mess and begins to sweep it all up, weaving lattices of detritus until there’s a tightly drawn nest between Nino and me. I want to tell the bird she’s got it all wrong, that you don’t make a home out of danger, but I like watching her nest here. It’s nice for all of this to be something else for a while, for the house to no longer have pressure to be a house. And maybe that’s why it’s been taking so long, this endless sea of futile repairs and restructuring, a pointless quest to change the shape of something that has been here longer than any of us have or ever will be.
I curl up around one side of the nest, and Nino curls up around the other. I make myself into the shape of the thing lying between us and around us, and I want to see what it becomes. I breathe out the cyclones of dust that live within my lungs, cough them onto the floorboards we keep trying to change, and I wait to see if the house takes them back. Absorbs it into its broken bones, uses it to fill in the cracks and the fissures. Maybe if I lie here long enough, it will fill me in too.
Paulette Pierce is a queer Pittsburgh-based writer currently working on their first novel and trying to preserve their local film community in their off hours. Their work has appeared in Maudlin House, SFWP, and Anti-Heroin Chic.
