Excerpt from “The Appeal of Chaos” (previously published in Frisk Magazine)
When spring came, she took a saw and drove horizontal lines into the bark of the maple on the edge of her lawn. She tore up her bed of flowering hostas, leaving them on the dirt where they lay like leafy hands withering in the sun. The great holes she dug in the lawn linger like burn marks.
Since then, she’s moved inside.
With her hands and her teeth and her strong arms and legs, she tears the house apart, bit by bit. She does this mostly at night. Or at least that’s when I watch her. She smashes trinkets on the floor, breaks glasses in the kitchen sink. She needs bigger tools now: a crow bar, a rubber mallet, a hammer, a saw. She brings stacks of china plates into the dining room, small jade figurines, her clothes, and big steel scissors. She lines things up on the dining room table and works her way through them. Crushing, hurling, smashing. In some places, she has used the rubber mallet to break through the wall, baring the yellow upright studs. Wires hang from the walls amidst crumbling sheet rock.
Her racket wakes me up. Sometimes I can hear her grunting.
I first met her during a snowfall in January, before she began destroying her house. Our driveway runs along her backyard and she was out there one morning, in boots and a robe, tramping down hard circles in the snow, rings that met and intersected. I spoke to her and she looked at me, startled. She was so bright and alive in that snow light that I couldn’t make myself walk away from her to my car. We stood there a moment and then I said, Nice design you’ve got there. She frowned slightly, looked down at the snow and then back up at me.
I can’t stand illusion, she said. The idea that things are solid, it’s such a lie. Snow is the worst. Her voice was deep and graveled, not at all what I’d expected.
The snowy plain of my yard stretched to my right, a sheath of snow, looking as permanent and smooth as the surface of a rock. I thought about how much everyone loves the way snow looks before it melts and then they complain for weeks about the gray mess left over. Then I walked out into it, and began tramping circles down, just like she had done.