11. THE HOUSE DREAMS
THE HOUSE DREAMS
The house dreams of uprooting and starting over by the ocean.
It wants to smell sea salt and blue whales.
It longs to absorb the wisdom of what the ocean has to say.
The house wants to die in a drowning accident.
In obsidian waters, the house pictured itself slowly pulled toward the ocean floor, water rushing through the front door, windows exploding, photographs floating, oxygen depleting, losing sight, losing thought, and bursting with the vibrant boozy colors of DMT before succumbing to the light.
The house wonders if it could become a ghost. Maybe the ghost version of itself could manifest as another form. A mystical transformation into fog or a cloud or an earthworm.
The house dreams of everyone who lived there before.
They sit at a long round dinner table which reaches into the ether of white light past the house, past the forest, past the town.
The former tenants are adorned in rich ruby red flowing fabric, feasting on towering piles of flower petals.
The children graze dandelions and sunflower petals from the table with their faces buried in the piles as though they were little goats or cows out on a pasture.
The adults eat crimson roses, lavender from the stems, white jasmine petals, yellow and pink lantana bundles.
Petals cascade out of their mouths as they speak to one another in gibberish.
White-tailed deer and painted turtles stumble in and eat from the overflow.
Flower petals fill the house up and spill out through cracks in the walls, through the windows, through the front door and the back door.
The house used to dream about being born.
It started out as a perfect round violet seed, planted in the dead center of a meteor crater where silence penetrated the hollowed-out curve and bustling migrating flocks flew around, but never over.
The fruitful womb beneath the crater was cosmic swirls of glittering stars and the constant sound of soft static.
The violet seed sprouted into spiky green and yellow wild grass that spread in a spiral and filled the crater over time, mimicking a giant bed of moss.
It became an open wide mouth, trapping any creature that found itself trying to gnaw or pull at the green and yellow for sustenance.
The house dreams about fetuses buried beneath the roots of the oak trees outside.
When they are born, they crawl into the house like ants on a mission.
Their backs are covered in horse-hair mushrooms and baby tooth moss.
Their palms and soles of their feet are bursting with the tentacles of a sundew, secreting mucilage, leaving sticky trails behind.
The baby creatures crawl up the walls and they suckle on the ceiling until it softens and falls in on itself.
They eat through glass and adobe and they make their way into the garden where they devour the hibiscus flowers and the bees and the crickets and the roses.
They chew through the thorns and the bristles.
They sniff the dirt, snorting and yipping at it.
They are maddened and wild and they grunt like small piglets.
When they are finally full, they dig into the soil until their bodies are buried.
The tops of their heads sprout into tremendous trumpets of sun pitcher plants.
The house dreams of death. White light fills the insides of all the rooms, beaming up into the sky, imitating a sunburst. Ethereal music fills the air. The house turns into stardust and spreads out into a never-ending universe.
What a delight, thinks the house, to fade away into nothing.