This is a house. This is the window and this is the little red door and these are the three and a half floors that reach up to the blue blue sky. This is the orange couch with ugly brown stripes that lives in the den like a tiger. It curls itself around the wall and breathes deeply but shallowly. Hick hick hick every time someone rubs their fingers through its fur. Hick hick hick with the small bites that each touch leaves in its wake. It opens its eyes, foggy and baleful with old age and yawns with a wide-toothed smile that would be fearsome if it weren’t so cracked and worn with age.
This is the rug that greets your toes and tickles your heels and kisses your arches and says Welcome Welcome Welcome. It used to say bah but the couch got really hungry a long time ago and felt neglected and went straight for the jugular, so to speak, of the shag pillows in the study. But that was a long time ago and the grudge has long since passed, though they stay separated. It would hurt too much for either of them to be in the same room now. It’s just too much to ask of anyone. So now the couch growls sometimes in its sleep and thinks of soft warm things when it dreams at night in its den and the rug counts its brothers and sisters to go to sleep each night.
This is Olivia. This is her house. This is her window and her little red door and her three and a half floors that scrape some of the blue off of the beautiful sky. This is her purple hair, cut short in an awkward bob that curls at the apples of her cheeks. This is her orange hair, long and flowing and pin straight. It grazes against her back and creates an itch between her shoulder blades and she just reaches around with her long long arms and scratches it.
This is Chip and this is Daniel and they live with Olivia and they are her friends. They used to be her brothers but then something happened. Something important that she can’t remember but it left everything in ruins except for this house. This house with the orange door and no windows and seven floors that rip through the red sky and leave it tattered around the edges.
Chip lives in the den with the tiger and he pets it occasionally and it goes hick hick hick but he doesn’t mean to hurt it. It’s just that sometimes he forgets. He lives in the den with the tiger and the tan carpet that have splotches of green from the bad thing that happened that nobody can remember anymore and Daniel explained it once. He said they were water spots, like the ones you find in the ceiling when it rains too much except that the spots are on the ground now because the water is slowly coming up from below now instead of from above.
Daniel lives in the study with a lone shag pillow and his laptop and his wire-rimmed glasses and his sweaters and he stays there until the sun goes down. Until the red sky that’s torn in places and worn-out in others shifts and changes and fades to purple. He gathers it in his hands and molds it and melds it and punches a hole in it—sometimes whole, sometimes half, and sometimes somewhere in between—and puts it all back up where it belongs. Sometimes he forgets to punch a hole at all though and then the sky is very dark.
This is Olivia’s room, which is very much the same as the one she had before the bad thing but is somehow different. Things seem less concrete now. If she presses her hand to the wall it caves in on her hand, like those foam pillows that she played with the other day at the mall while her parents picked out a new mattress for the guest room but they’re not here now and neither is the mattress. She has a small bed that is pushed up against the wall and a radio and a clock that goes tick tick tick almost like the tiger downstairs but not quite. She has two windows and she looks out of these and watches Daniel make the sky and the moon and never stars and wonders how it was things used to be. A ringing starts in her ears and she thinks that maybe she’s thinking too hard on certain things but somebody has to now that they’re the only people left. It stays that way for a while though and she feels out of place, like something is dragging her to the surface and now she can’t breathe and she wants to stay in this world of purple skies and hole-punched moons and tigers and sheep but then Daniel looks up from the yard and says Wake up Wake up Wake up and Olivia opens her eyes.
