I couldn’t believe the listing when I came across it. It was a beautiful bungalow situated far out of town, with plenty of land for my daughter roam about on it. A bargain deal, somehow left on the table for many years. So in spite of my misgivings about the state of the roof, and the encroachment of the garden, I took it up. With a little time and a little love, this place would be perfect for the two of us. Two women beating our own path through the thick brush of life. Literally.
When I told Krisa about the upcoming change, she was ecstatic. I was glad of her age, it wouldn’t be too long before a change like this would pit her against the world. I counted myself lucky to be free of the woes of a teenager. She looked at the listing pictures with glee. Lots of running water to catch crawdads and chase after toads. Space for any kid to do what kids do best, explore and learn about the world around them. It was situated in between a large creek and the coast of an undeveloped lake, ours being one of the only docks in the water. A place to spend a summer afternoon swimming and enoying the sun. Things looked great for the two of us, and we were both gliding through the thin air of a joyus atmosphere.
A few weeks later, the deal had closed and we were ready to occupy the new space. Things had become more concrete in the intervening weeks. A plan was to become reality, and big soft ideas were reducing into a harder and more tangible truth. The house was situated closer to the center of the plot, and the lay of the land meant that any cars would not be able to make it up to the house. The years since the death of the last owner meant that invasive, prickly bushes had encroached upon the path to the house. Before we could even begin to unload our car, pruning of the overgrowth had to be done. It took us both nearly half the day to finish the laburious task, but fueled by the pride that hard work offers, we managed to get what we needed to the house by night.
We sat on the living room floor that evening on a set of sleeping bags. We discussed all of our plans for the future, and ignored the drafty windows and leaky roofs. These things could be changed, so why worry and fret over them in a time when we were presented with so much oppurtunity and hope about our future. Tommorow would be a fresh day, and we could go into town and buy ourselves the essentials. A weeks worth of food, a few pieces of furniture to make our abode more at home, and a laundry list of home improvement tools and supplies.
That night was one of the worst I’ve ever had. The unfamiliarity of the space meant that every time I awoke, for just a moment my head would be in my old apartment bedroom, or my college dorm, or any place that I used to spend more fitful nights. But the rattle of the window panes and the branches brushing on the back door reminded me of my unfamiliar suroundings. The wind was harsh and rent a cacaphony upon my ears. My groggy imagination filled in whatever things my spatial knowledge didn’t yet contain. I would imagine a predatory animals prowling just outside the walls. Great chasms in the ground would open up and flood with water. Sub human screams would wail up out of the basement just as I was to drift into slumber. At once I shot up on to my feet, sure of the danger lurking just out of sight. And just as suddenly as I got to my feet, the world around me shrank into oblivion. Suddenly I was there, in the middle of my living room. The wind was present but hardly harsh. There were no prowling animals. There was nothing in the basement. Just me, a dusty house, and my daughter, sleeping rather fitfully on the floor next to me. I must have been half awake, still more asleep than I could have realized. By the time my heartrate had slowed, and the bite of adrenaline had faded from viscerality to memory, the first rays of light were starting to color the sky a guassian blue.
I left the house and my sleeping child on the floor. I went into the backyard and stood for a moment. Something at the base of the house had caught my eye. A spot where the dirt was a lighter color, and looser in grain. Following my compulsion, I dug away at it. Before me now was a space in the masonry. A gap between the rocks that formed the foundation. I placed my hand inside and felt around. I felt the bindings of a book. A few minutes later I had read what the book still contained. Sparse entries from a terse man, the deceased owner of the house, Horace. He had built it in the fifties. He was at first rather bitter about the state of the land. He had been sold the land on a promise that it was suitable for farming. This land was anything but suitable for agriculture. The entries covered very many decades with very few words. Over time he had become attatched to the land. The way he had described it, it was as though over time the land and the person had imbued one another with their most defining properties. He could not, and would not be removed from the land. He died bitter about the state of the world and its inhabitants.
Thoughts of this journal straddled my mind as Krisa and I got to the work of the day
About half way through the day I saw a gnarled tree just out of the way of the path. It cast an awful shade on one side of the house. I asked Krisa to bring me the axe we had just bought. As soon as I stepped off the narrow path towards the tree, my feet began sinking in the mud. I had to use the axe to leverage each step. Shoes full of wet, coarse mud, I stood next to the tree. Propped up, feet sunk firmly into the mud, I made my swing. The axe glanced off of a hardened knot beneath the gnarled bark. I swung again. This time, the axe head broke off from the axe, and flew in at the most peculiar angle towards my leg. Not a direct hit, but the sharp end of the axe gashed through my calve as it flew through the air. Immediatley hot bright red blood flowed out and mixed into the cold dark earth around me. I swore out in response. Krisa came running from behind the house to see me there half buried and holding back salty tears. With great difficulty I made it out and she helped me get inside to clean and dress my wound. Work was done for the day, but I couldn’t help but look at the tree again. It stood there seemingly having taken less harm from the axe than myself. I lamented about cheap garbage and made my mind to never buy from that hardware store again.
As the weeks of work grew longer, the days of delay stacked up. I was having some kind of accident nearly every day. Nothing to seriously injure me, but just enough to heavily discourage any progress that could be made. Krisa’s previous joy had faded. She would ask me why we couldn’t just go back. I tried to explain to a child how some things once done, cannot be undone, and the past can never be returned to. The truth was that I was stubbornley prideful. I knew I could finish this task. I knew I could turn this into a beatiful place to raise a kid. I just needed to be a little more patient, the two of us suffer for a little longer and we would breakthrough. How naive I was.
The night it happened was the worst night I ever had. It began with my nightmares. They were like last time, full of sound and sight and quickly changing rooms of an amourphous and non-euclidean house. I could hear Krisa yelling for my help just out of the room I was in, and every time I entered she would disapear around the next corner. Eventually it became so dark I couldn’t even see, only hear the terrible wretches of sheer desperation and panic. That was when I awoke. Dream merged with reality. I was suddenly awake in the dark; my daughter still screaming in the dark, from outside.
I gained my bearings and was out the back door, barefoot, and running towards the shore of the lake within 5 seconds. I got to there just in time to see my daughters shreiking head fall below the surface of the moonlit waters. The silence was worse than the sound of my daughters ethereal wales. I dove into the water to find her. Frantically searching for a leg, an arm, anything corporeal to grab on to and heave out of the lake. I continued to reach out into nothing. Frantically seconds added up. Seconnds turned to minutes before I could manage to make them stop counting. It wasnt for twenty minutes more that I gave up looking and called for the police. They dredged the tiny lake for her body for the whole day.
They never found her. But I know who was responsible.
The days I lived there after her death were devoid of anything, even the badluck and night terrors of the previous month. I poured my grief into the rebuilding of the house after that. I have forgotten most of it. My mind was filled with only grief and had lost the capacity to think or care about the present. When I finished the repairs, I moved away. I never sell the property. But I do go and visit each month, to prune the garden and dust the house.