jack's house

My room hasn’t always felt this way. I used to sit in here most days and make friends with the holes in the walls and floor. Often I’d put my feet in the watery gaps. I liked the sound it made: hollow sound somewhere between a shatter and a pop. My eyelashes found the sun reaching through the weatherboards. I was too happy to anticipate raindrops leaking through the roof. 

Today the room bears a strange colour. It is full of light which you can’t even be sure is light because it might just be your eyes trying to improve what they see. You can’t trust yourself a lot of the time.

The sky is looming. A big smoking void giving me head rush. It jolts – shunt shunt shunt – the sky collects me up and takes my mind on field trips into space. My brain shreds itself and denies that it is a part of my body. I am encouraged to find a place in which to occupy myself until consciousness returns. I do my head in if I think too much. I try not to think too much but you know what it is like; if you try not to think about something that is all you can think about.

My mind is a small child. It likes to run away. Sometimes it meanders too far from its maternal body and is lost for a short time until a kind adult returns my child back to me. Some kids go missing permanently and their faces end up stacked vertically in newspaper pages.  Candy is helpful for luring lost children. Little colourful candies. Some are round, some are long and thin. They all taste horrible but look very nice.

The left side of the room does not look very nice. The entire wall is burnt out. You can still see all the exposed wires and beams: the house’s bones sticking out of its scorched skin. It’s strange seeing flesh which is not the colour it is supposed to be. It doesn’t feel nice to be seeing the insides of something when they are supposed to be contained.

You can take a look around if you like. I don’t mind. This is my bed, over here. And there’s where I sit sometimes.

Yesterday I had a visitor while I was sitting there. I was inspecting what used to be a window. They’ve put black lines on it now. I used to do stained glass art. You frame each colour in a black outline. That’s what they’ve put on the window except there’s no coloured glass. Although sometimes if I tilt my head the right way I’m pretty sure I can see colours. Maybe it’s just a trick of this strange, faded light.
 

I can go up the window. I can touch it and trace the black outline with my sight. I can breathe ice onto the window and write shapes in it. I can spell out some words and write SOS messages to the dogs yapping on the dried yellow lawn.

There’s an apple tree out there too. I think I’m supposed eat the fruit so that I stay healthy. But they won’t let us outside. If you don’t eat the fruit they get angry at you fi you go outside they get angry at you because you will catch a cold. Anyway, apples aren’t very good for you. Did you hear what happened to Snow White? Except she woke up again. I probably wouldn’t wake up again if I ate the apple. And Eve. She had a bad apple experience too. They’re deceiving, apples are., they’re like the candy. They look good but they are not. But people will try and tell you they are good so they can trick you into going outside to retrieve one. They just want you to catch a cold.

You’re being silly, she said. Eat – it.

After you have eaten you are supposed to get ready for bed. I think I used to like sleeping but because of all these holes in the wall now it's not very pleasant. When I'm trying to sleep I can hear the rain  scratching incessantly on the surfaces outside. The sound is awful. It rots away my head until my sheets are bleeding. Tonight it is very bad. It's coming from both sides of the room and gets worse and worse and there is wind too and then tapping tap tap tap tap which starts quiet and gets louder and closer. The wind howls over the scratch scratch scratch scratch scratch scratch scratch –

Oh... It’s stopped now. That's better.

But it is still difficult to sleep. Almost more so in silence. I’m not really sure what to do in here sometimes. I’m just waiting I think. Waiting for the weather to get better. And for the tree to bear good fruit. It takes a few years. You don’t get good fruit straight away when you first plant a tree.