Sketch of a House

It’s a house, but only because people live in it. Two crooked stairs lead up to a porch – three folding chairs (two folded, one un-) lean to the right, while the floorboards of the left side of the porch are broken and buckled inward, like a great foot had slammed down from the sky and dented the once-fine carpentry. The screen door flaps perpetually, though, weirdly, there isn’t any wind – the misshapen house is somehow aware of any pertinent structural damages that might clue the visitor to the manifold repugnances that once took place between its crooked walls. Mildew creeps from caulking around the sills, etcetera. One window is covered over in a blackened sheet of scrap metal.

It’s a house, but only because people live in it. From a distance of one hundred yards, the precise number of bushes foresting the cement walkway remains indeterminate. Each bare branch interferes with the next and it’s all a complicated wash of overlapping and bifurcating tendrils, such that no one can say for sure that each bush is, say, ontologically distinct. Or alive, either. Upon approaching, the bush-wash breaks down into distinct bushes, but the walkway breaks up – cracks riddle the cement slabs, each of them seemingly pried from the earth and dropped back carelessly, each now slightly maligned from the others., and so the house winks, another sign as to its cognizance of its owners’ many past degradations.