OctopusMagazine#11

KRISTIN NACA

HOUSE

Everybody lives in a house. The same house but with different trees. Each house finishes at the roof, with a chimney, and antenna for feeding pictures into the t.v. Inside is a living room with a wooden floor, or maybe some carpet. And outside, grass sits in the yard thick as carpet. Every house has two or more beds, depending on how many children, or how many relatives live there, how big the beds are. There’s also a kitchen, a bathroom, and a place beside the grass to park the car.

A house has houses all around it. You can drive on a street between the houses until you reach the highway, or into the next town Arlington, Virginia where houses are dotted between Miller’s Music Spot and Whitey’s Broasted Chicken Restaurant. In Arlington people sit on their steps outside of their houses, or on folding chairs along their small grassy carpets. And I say, “Look at the people in those houses,” and my father says, “Those aren’t houses, Sweetie. They’re shacks.”

House is a five-letter word. It is pronounced /aus/, /aüs/ or, /aüz/.

Looking at these phonetic spellings, you’d probably say, But wait! What have you done with my ‘h’? Where has that chimneystack, cleft of a letter gone to?

And, Nowhere, I say. Nowhere, trying to comfort you. ‘h’ is breathed, not said. A change of direction. A thread of air pulled up your windpipe, expulsion from the gut and lungs. Oh! Oh ‘h’! I say, you make health out of wealth, house of a louse, a home of Rome—just conceiving it. The heart and the earth—by the way the wind blows.

I say the word house and a beautiful image stirs in your head. Like this, House. And then poof! The beautiful image stirring in your head. Yes, how beautiful it is with its chimney and windows and front door lowing. How wonderful to house such a beautiful house in your head. How wonderful and immaterial to be a sketch in a bubble that flutters inside you!

Once the word house sentenced, “There was a brick house on Macon Avenue.” And whenever those words sentenced together, sounds soaked like a bruise, black and blue between them. And though sounds dousing one another wasn’t anything new, nor injured no word in particular, still words—as they were known to do—blamed this word and that for their ruin.

Avenue: “Macon, your ‘n’ is leaving ink clouds, my ‘A’ dyed blue.”
Macon: “Get over it, Avenue. Even capitalized you’re common.”

The two words nubbed on, ‘n’ bleeding across the dignified Avenue, while house stood silent—never mind brick leeching the space between them with color. When one day, Macon pitted them against each other.

Macon: “House, have you noticed your stomach growing wider? The
round sounds of house filling the mouth whenever you two are
mentioned together.”

And house was confused. Or just uncommonly distraught when she faced up to brick to ask her:

House: “Brick. Do you notice I’m hardly myself? Just a mass
of round sounds. An ‘ouse when I sit to one side of you.”

Brick: “House, don’t blow your stack. Your head’s in the clouds again.”

House, yet more confused and not as well-mannered as everyone thinks—she’s often mistaken for home, her cousin, known as a charming host who throws great parties—chewed out words she’d later regret.

House: “Brick house, they say about us. Brick house. My ‘h’
always trampled by the static ‘k’ makes grinding from the mouth.”

But brash ‘k’ shot up before ‘bri-‘ could stop her.

‘k’: “Look here, /-k’ouse/. Your ‘h’ is a foolish place-holder. For ‘k’ was all friction, and knew not of the ebbs in clausal frailty.

‘k’: “You know, house, this sentence can sentence without you.” As the other sounds begged ‘k’ not to, she finished it.

‘k’: “There was a brick on Macon Avenue.”

So house was gone, a drifter blowing sentence-to-sentence, ‘k’-job to ‘k’-job—her specialization. From “a trick house for catching mice and small pests,” to the first drafts of “Bleak House” before the typesetting, to odd jobs at “the smoke house,” “the break house,” “the steak house one must never return to…”

Then house, broken, wandered to other sentence, sound-combinations. “We should go to your house,” depressed ‘h’ to a gurgle, next to the rasping and passive-aggressive ‘r,’ who claimed her pal ‘s,’ “Does the work of you, house, and still more.” In “The green house on the left,” green was full of advice at the bar.

Green: “You know house, don’t complain about ‘n.’ You need thicker skin. Take ‘g,’ for example. A green girl—she wouldn’t complain.”

Then a series of ‘b’-jobs, and ‘p’-jobs, and ‘s’-work that bowled the ‘h’ over. While house slept quietly, ‘z’ rang in her head.

And for the rest of her days misfortune followed her, sentence, language, country, continent. When house traipsed Europe: Liaison, liaison, mon amis, the French words said. In Spanish, ‘h’ suffered mistaken identity. ¿‘Ache’ o ‘eje’ o ‘equi’ o ‘jota,’ cuál es su nombre, ‘h’? The Spanish words said.

So house found a quiet spot in the country, just to the right of the silent period. House. And spent her days sounding her name to herself. And wondering if she’d ever be heard from again, started her autobiography.

“Once, there was a house with no ‘h.’”

Suppose there is a bubble that flutters inside you. Or suppose it builds in the plastic air. Or the plastic that is liquid and luminous yet air. Or suppose in reverse the air plastic. And in its sloshing to-and-fro forms teacups of air unsettling its layers. In the teacups is air air not plastic. And teacups are cool and porcelain as anything that’s cool and porcelain. And suppose bubble—though never a bubble before—porcelain and cool as anything once thrown from a wheel, a fired thing, a red thing before it sits and cools on a rack thing, formed of the sloshing that makes bubbles in the plastic air. And bubble air inside of it, an echo of liquid spun into its well. And the echo of heat as liquid brews in the smile that’s the bottom of the well.

Houses come in two sizes—big and bigger. Since the rich always get richer, there will always be a need for bigger, more gigantic houses. Houses big enough for all the dough they make.

It is not empirically possible to prove the existence of the rich. (So say studies funded by the rich.) Nor possible to prove the existence of the poor. (Cite similar studies).

There are purple houses in America that make a stink with their neighborhood associations. There are enormous red houses we call ‘barns’ that stand in the country, where farmers stack their feed, and tools, and sometimes chickens—but for nostalgia—no one mentions them. There are houses in the warmer states put together of hay bails and dirt and cement-like fixatives and painted the color of the land and no one, not even the shifty fox, complains. There are houses made of wood or painted to resemble wood in the deep forests. And just last summer when neighbors painted their house ‘Cape Cod Grey,’ and the rest of us snickered, But this is not Cape Cod, and beside the too-doo a gaggle of book-worms made over the spelling of Grey on a paint can, not-one, single, solitary complaint. But in America when there is a purple house, it is sure to make a stink with the neighborhood association. And as sure as it will be a stink, it will also surely become news in the town newspaper whose name has wedded and is wistful for the once, great rivalry of Sun, Star, Gazette, and Intelligencers hurrying to report of the comings and goings of the town. And the paper will re-conceptualize the engagement for a wider audience, naming it, ‘a nasty skirmish,’ and then angle it, ‘stubborn, purple home-owner’ vs. ‘determined, neighborhood association.’ And the local-color piece will play in the Metro section of the Sunday paper people reach for as if reaching for their toast. And still then, it will not be mentioned how street lamps gauze the town over in purple, when the cool, dimming light of August approaches—houses, and sidewalks, the laundry mat windows, and laundry chiming in the windows of the washing machines, and suds purpling. And no one hurries to write this, nor bangs door to door for someone else to witness the phenomena. Nor mentions, however, still, in the dimming light of August, purple cascades even from pens; so somehow—even without volition—purple poems are written, telling of the world awash in plush, August light. And of the purple music box. And stars through the lens of the periscope. And lovers soothing against each other in the purple heat of August, leaving swatches of color on the sheets beneath them. And that, this purple light is a healing force that showers the tired townspeople, the homeowners, and all of the members of the neighborhood association, the farmers and contractors, hay-bailers and seed-handlers, newspaper reporters, and copy editors, managing editors, and publishers, layout operators, and laundry machinists, poets, and all of the readers who live in the town inside of that poem.