|
 |
||||||||||
|
|||||||||||
|
|||||||||||
The Secret of the Dancing Houses
by
Richard Pitaniello
What is it about houses that makes them dance? Why do they crust over black and seal the exits tight with super-strong tar? Why do they slide around their yards and peel away grass, making tsunamis of dirt? Why do they rattle and shake and spin, crushing cars to foil with a thundering rip and throwing me around like a pebble in a baby’s rattle?
Is it black magic? Probably not. My Loretta wasn’t into voodoo; I know because I kept asking her to make pincushion dolls of the foreman down at the construction yard I work at. But she won't participate in heathen blasphemy--she'll only study it.
But why are the houses dancing? Could it be demons from deep out of Hell that make houses dance? Hell no. Loretta, despite her faults, was a God-fearing woman.
I’m aware that "Dancing house" sounds like a mad-lib...or something my doctor would blame on a bad inner ear. But I know the truth. Houses dance.
But what makes them do it? Giants? Loretta was tall; maybe she had some giant’s blood and relatives. But no...I don’t think so.
So what is it that makes houses dance? I think it’s love, myself. Not the love between two houses--ridiculous!--but the love between two people. Even now as the walls spin and ceilings shake, while the house rattles and slides, throwing me around onto blood-freckled furniture...even now I remember Loretta, my late wife.
And I sigh.
Loretta would have either moaned or screamed at me for sighing, letting out my breath so roughly. Air was sacred to her, and breath even more so. "Breath is what God used to impregnate the Virgin Mary," she often told me, nodding after she said it. She also said that the air around a bed was the third partner every time we had sex, and she tried to flail herself so that the air stroked our bodies as much as our own fingers, cooling sweat. Sex with her was a better workout than a treadmill. She could sure move her body.
And when Loretta danced--she danced every day, incidentally--she hardly cared what direction her arms moved, but rather how the air around her would move when she twisted her body. I had to learn how to dance from somebody else--Loretta’s dancing was freaky.
But she loved it, loved dance beyond everything else. She even told me she wanted to die in the middle of a dance, she loved it so much. Love love and love.
You can only hate something that you once loved. Loretta loved me greatly at first, but something came between us. It might have been something I did, like suffocating roaches in jars and pinning them to corkboard by the hundreds. She thought that every roach was the same, but I know better. Sometimes you can tell just by a glance, sometimes it takes a magnifying glass or dissecting scope...but each roach is different. I know.
But now the walls are doing their jig, shaking off my beautiful bugs like dogs do with raindrops. Loretta could sure be stupid...God-fearing, but stupid; her, the country girl from Mississippi, daddy’s favorite of five kids, queen of the .223 rifle, religious and always babbling about the breath of God, and the bowler who bowled two 300 point games and refused to talk about it because pride was a sin. Perhaps we first started to have marital trouble when I had no choice but to smash her bowling balls into grit to make concrete. There wasn’t any mixed concrete left to fix the front walk, so this ingredient was an essential loss. I used a sledgehammer. Not a rusty sledge that a country girl like her would own, but a glistening and well-oiled sledge with a fiberglass handle. Loretta hated my fiberglass tools; she loved me once. She said she forgave me for the bowling balls after a while and I guess she was telling the truth--she wasn’t a liar, Loretta. She’s not tormenting me because of that.
So what came between her and me? Maybe it was because I killed her, danced her to death. Took her in my strong arms, spun her around, letting her head strike the doorframe. I flung her away from me and then pulled her back hard enough to break her spine. I spun her under my arm until her wrist cracked. I didn’t stop dancing until all I held was a bloody rag of skin shaped like a woman--no bones anymore, only sand and twigs. I stuffed her in the washing machine and let her spin and dance one last time. She deserved to get her wish, to die dancing.
But I don’t think she understood that I did this out of love. She was such a great person, but I could see the signs of hate almost ready to flare up in her--against me no less, but that’s beside the point. Hate is a sin, and Loretta didn’t want any sins. So I did her a favor, helped her get to Heaven, killed her now so that she wouldn’t have time to become more corrupted.
But I don’t think she knew that.
Yeah, Loretta loved me once. And I know that she is the one making my walls shake and furniture slip around the room over my spilt blood. I danced with her, and now my house is dancing...probably with another house. I imagine them holding onto one another with connecting power lines--either that or plumbing pipes. It’s a sight to see them spin, and I wish I could see better; but my windows have bled over with black tar, all but a tiny hole to see out of when I’m at that side of the room. I think this tar is the reason my house doesn’t shatter apart during the dance--a house stuck together with tar. This black, viscous goop also seals up my doors and clogs the chimney. I can’t leave. I must stay in my dancing house until I die of concussions or suffocate from the tar sealant, which probably fills the pipes and wires connecting my house to its dance partner building. I just hope it’s not a trailer I'm dancing with--I hate trailers.
The house briefly halts its jig, and my broken arm howls for a moment. Then the house is at it again. Except now the house is tumbling over itself, rolling rather than spinning. My wife...she did indeed love bowling.
And now we’re playing her game, her vengeance on a "spoiled ol’ city kid" husband. We’re bowling again. Maybe we’re thrown around by God...maybe giants...maybe angels, but I thought that when angels bowled we heard thunder and--though it is hard to tell with all this crashing in the background and the window mostly blocked by tar and dust--I don’t think it’s raining.
I just heard another of my bones crack, and something--a bigger house?--is crumbling above my house, showering it with debris. My house still does not break; that tar must be wickedly strong. Too bad I can’t market it to my construction company....
And now the house is silent, unmoving.
But I let out some breath and don’t get my hopes up...because my back is broken, and my wife still has a spare.
TO COMMENT ON THIS STORY CLICK HERE
© Pitaniello, 2007
Richard Pitaniello lurks in Latin halls and backwoods forests. His horror pretty much goes from one side of the spectrum to the other, from amazingly violent splatter-punk to supernatural stories without a single drop of blood meant to be evocative. Which he's better at remains to be seen.