A House Divided
This is my short short for English class. It's supposed to be a little more humorous than my last short story.
A House Divided
Martha brings home the wrecking ball. She sits in the yellow cab squinting at her thumb held up in line with our green front door, and she works some of the controls with her right hand. The wrecking ball sways, poised high in the air like a teacher’s ruler before coming down to smite little children who chose to daydream rather than state the fifty capitols.
Straight back from our front door lays the entryway and a closet where we keep our winter coats. The gas fireplace claims the wall beyond the closet. Adrian turned on the gas one day without lighting the fire; the house smelled like a gas station. The glass doors leading outside onto our wooden porch need cleaning, which I usually do, but they will be gone soon. In the same path, but one story higher, a carpeted hallway leads to Bella’s bedroom.
“A little to the left, sweetie,” I say. Martha’s tongue slips out of her mouth to lick her lips, but her thumb stays lined up with the door. “You’ll be terribly sad when your gardenias go,” I say.
“I already moved them.” She yanks one of the black knobs back some more and the wrecking ball draws even further back, the way I pull my kids back on the swing higher and higher until letting them go to fly through the air.
“And the children?” I say. “Did you move them too?”
“They’re next door.” She nods her head and brings her hand down to rest on a red knob. She commands the controls with the ease of a teenage boy commanding the controls of his PlayStation. The cab backs up on our lawn until the wrecking ball’s path is same as the one Martha mapped out with her thumb.
The machine creaks and groans from holding the weight of the wrecking ball poised for so long, and then it stops. The wrecking ball crashes into our redbrick mailbox, and Martha looks back to see what is slowing the ball down. Redbrick debris flies into the white-picket fence that I repainted last week. As the wrecking ball swoops down to my level, a tidal wave of air pushes my hair back. The juggernaut bursts through the middle of our house like an over-exuberant child playing Red-Rover.
Martha liked things in multiples of two. We had sat down at our kitchen table across from each other with four empty chairs left at the table. She had written up an agreement that was eleven pages long with a twelfth page that had the current week’s grocery list written on it. She made two copies of the packet, one for herself and one for me. We went through all twenty-four topics in the packet, including the last one dealing with who got to keep the Bath & Body Works soaps.
“How should we split the house?” she said.
“We could sell it,” I said. I brushed my hands over the surface of our wood table, following the swirls in the wood with my fingertips. Martha frowned and pursed her lips. She tapped her right temple with her finger before her face relaxed.
“We’ll split it fifty-fifty,” she had said and placed two red checkmarks next to problem number two.
Bella looks at the house and sobs. “Mr. Fluffy Bunny was inside,” she says. Snot runs out of her nose, and she wipes it on her little yellow sundress. I scoop her up into my arms and kiss her the golden locks of hair sticking to her forehead.
I stand with the kids and wait for any left over pieces of stucco to fall off our split house. Martha gets the wrecking ball under control and turns the machine off.
“Kids, go get washed up in Mommy’s bathroom,” she says. Bella and Isaac race each other to the place where the front door used to be. They clamber over piles of debris, and I worry for a moment that Bella might have scratched herself when she stoops down, but she only pops up and cuddles a dirty, pink puff ball close to her body and yells out for Isaac to slow down.
Adrian stands next to me, his head resting against my chest as I cart my hands through his brown hair. He tilts his head back to look into my face. “Dad, Mom’s got all the bathrooms,” he says. I nod and give him a push between his shoulder blades. He picks his way through the fallen debris of our home into the gapping hole on the left.
“I guess you get the left side,” I say. Martha nods, wiping her hands on the floral apron she wears around her waste.
I had eyed the next topic on our list and re-read it three times. My skin stung and itched as if I had been rolling in wet grass. I bit my lip and tapped my foot to the rhythm of my heart’s increasing speed. I rubbed my clammy hands repeatedly on my jeans.
“Now for the children,” Martha said staring down through her glasses at the paper as if she were a scientist studying a new species of insect. “Three.” She spat the number out of her mouth as if it tasted bitter and fowl.
“Well, we can’t split the children,” I said. I snorted through my nose. “Far too messy if we each took one and a half.”
Martha tapped her chin and looked over to our refrigerator. We had two calendars hanging next to each other; they were exactly the same but events and reminders were split evenly between the two.
“You get them Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday,” she said. “I’ll take them Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.”
I waited in the silence that followed as Martha wrote down the notes in her packet. “Wednesday?” I said.
“Mr. Johnson always said he wanted grandchildren. I’m sure he won’t mind watching them on Wednesdays,” she said. Two more red checkmarks appeared on her packet.
I thatch pieces of bamboo into twenty different mats to hang over my new, two-story entrance. The bamboo grows rampant in our backyard making a small panda sanctuary. Adrian helps me tie pieces of rope to the mats to hold them together. Martha hangs up an assortment of sarongs and bed sheets to cover her new entrance; I have a feeling her wall won’t last as long as mine.
Every morning I walk outside to water my bamboo mats. They’re dead, but adding water keeps them pliant and prevents them from drying out too fast in the heat of June. I plant some bamboo in the ground below the huge hole, but it will be awhile before the bamboo grows thick enough to provide a natural wall. Until then, I leave the bamboo mats in place and use the office window as a makeshift door.
Martha puts up two mailboxes: one for me and one for her. She won’t remove the second mailbox when the post-man informs her of the policy violation. He finally calls the police, and Martha has to take my mailbox off the front lawn. She puts it in front of my bamboo wall instead and puts my mail in it.
I buy a blue hammock and hang it between two large oak trees in my half of the yard. Martha returns to our split house two hours later with an orange hammock. “Orange is the complementary color to blue,” she says.
When I am gone on a business trip, she calls me on my sixth day away. “James, it’s four o’clock,” she says.
“Yeah, I won’t be able to leave until tomorrow,” I say. The faint hum of a long-distance phone call floats between us until she sniffles.
“You have to come home now, James,” she says. “Tomorrow will make it seven days.”
I drive five hundred miles and arrive home at midnight. I knock on Martha’s bedroom window. She smiles at me and closes the drapes. I leave for my bamboo mats when the light in her room turns off.
When Martha’s frail body refuses to move from bed, I enter her half of the house for the first time in twenty-five years. She had changed the sarongs and sheets hanging over the gaping entrance over the years until she had finally called a maintenance company to fill in the hole with a concrete wall. She still sleeps on her half of the bed as if waiting for me to fill the other side. Her brown hair streaked with gray fans out on her pillow like a headstone.
“Are you ready to die, James?” she says
I shake my head and wait, holding her hand to make ten grasping fingers. She spends forty-two days gasping for breath and refusing to be taken to a hospital. She dies on the forty-second day waiting for me.
Fifteen days after her death, I put half of her ashes in her side of our house and the other half on my side. I finish the job she had started twenty-five years ago, and I demolish the two standing structures to make one heaping pile of ruble.
On the seventeenth day I buy a one-story house with three bedrooms
A House Divided
Martha brings home the wrecking ball. She sits in the yellow cab squinting at her thumb held up in line with our green front door, and she works some of the controls with her right hand. The wrecking ball sways, poised high in the air like a teacher’s ruler before coming down to smite little children who chose to daydream rather than state the fifty capitols.
Straight back from our front door lays the entryway and a closet where we keep our winter coats. The gas fireplace claims the wall beyond the closet. Adrian turned on the gas one day without lighting the fire; the house smelled like a gas station. The glass doors leading outside onto our wooden porch need cleaning, which I usually do, but they will be gone soon. In the same path, but one story higher, a carpeted hallway leads to Bella’s bedroom.
“A little to the left, sweetie,” I say. Martha’s tongue slips out of her mouth to lick her lips, but her thumb stays lined up with the door. “You’ll be terribly sad when your gardenias go,” I say.
“I already moved them.” She yanks one of the black knobs back some more and the wrecking ball draws even further back, the way I pull my kids back on the swing higher and higher until letting them go to fly through the air.
“And the children?” I say. “Did you move them too?”
“They’re next door.” She nods her head and brings her hand down to rest on a red knob. She commands the controls with the ease of a teenage boy commanding the controls of his PlayStation. The cab backs up on our lawn until the wrecking ball’s path is same as the one Martha mapped out with her thumb.
The machine creaks and groans from holding the weight of the wrecking ball poised for so long, and then it stops. The wrecking ball crashes into our redbrick mailbox, and Martha looks back to see what is slowing the ball down. Redbrick debris flies into the white-picket fence that I repainted last week. As the wrecking ball swoops down to my level, a tidal wave of air pushes my hair back. The juggernaut bursts through the middle of our house like an over-exuberant child playing Red-Rover.
Martha liked things in multiples of two. We had sat down at our kitchen table across from each other with four empty chairs left at the table. She had written up an agreement that was eleven pages long with a twelfth page that had the current week’s grocery list written on it. She made two copies of the packet, one for herself and one for me. We went through all twenty-four topics in the packet, including the last one dealing with who got to keep the Bath & Body Works soaps.
“How should we split the house?” she said.
“We could sell it,” I said. I brushed my hands over the surface of our wood table, following the swirls in the wood with my fingertips. Martha frowned and pursed her lips. She tapped her right temple with her finger before her face relaxed.
“We’ll split it fifty-fifty,” she had said and placed two red checkmarks next to problem number two.
Bella looks at the house and sobs. “Mr. Fluffy Bunny was inside,” she says. Snot runs out of her nose, and she wipes it on her little yellow sundress. I scoop her up into my arms and kiss her the golden locks of hair sticking to her forehead.
I stand with the kids and wait for any left over pieces of stucco to fall off our split house. Martha gets the wrecking ball under control and turns the machine off.
“Kids, go get washed up in Mommy’s bathroom,” she says. Bella and Isaac race each other to the place where the front door used to be. They clamber over piles of debris, and I worry for a moment that Bella might have scratched herself when she stoops down, but she only pops up and cuddles a dirty, pink puff ball close to her body and yells out for Isaac to slow down.
Adrian stands next to me, his head resting against my chest as I cart my hands through his brown hair. He tilts his head back to look into my face. “Dad, Mom’s got all the bathrooms,” he says. I nod and give him a push between his shoulder blades. He picks his way through the fallen debris of our home into the gapping hole on the left.
“I guess you get the left side,” I say. Martha nods, wiping her hands on the floral apron she wears around her waste.
I had eyed the next topic on our list and re-read it three times. My skin stung and itched as if I had been rolling in wet grass. I bit my lip and tapped my foot to the rhythm of my heart’s increasing speed. I rubbed my clammy hands repeatedly on my jeans.
“Now for the children,” Martha said staring down through her glasses at the paper as if she were a scientist studying a new species of insect. “Three.” She spat the number out of her mouth as if it tasted bitter and fowl.
“Well, we can’t split the children,” I said. I snorted through my nose. “Far too messy if we each took one and a half.”
Martha tapped her chin and looked over to our refrigerator. We had two calendars hanging next to each other; they were exactly the same but events and reminders were split evenly between the two.
“You get them Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday,” she said. “I’ll take them Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.”
I waited in the silence that followed as Martha wrote down the notes in her packet. “Wednesday?” I said.
“Mr. Johnson always said he wanted grandchildren. I’m sure he won’t mind watching them on Wednesdays,” she said. Two more red checkmarks appeared on her packet.
I thatch pieces of bamboo into twenty different mats to hang over my new, two-story entrance. The bamboo grows rampant in our backyard making a small panda sanctuary. Adrian helps me tie pieces of rope to the mats to hold them together. Martha hangs up an assortment of sarongs and bed sheets to cover her new entrance; I have a feeling her wall won’t last as long as mine.
Every morning I walk outside to water my bamboo mats. They’re dead, but adding water keeps them pliant and prevents them from drying out too fast in the heat of June. I plant some bamboo in the ground below the huge hole, but it will be awhile before the bamboo grows thick enough to provide a natural wall. Until then, I leave the bamboo mats in place and use the office window as a makeshift door.
Martha puts up two mailboxes: one for me and one for her. She won’t remove the second mailbox when the post-man informs her of the policy violation. He finally calls the police, and Martha has to take my mailbox off the front lawn. She puts it in front of my bamboo wall instead and puts my mail in it.
I buy a blue hammock and hang it between two large oak trees in my half of the yard. Martha returns to our split house two hours later with an orange hammock. “Orange is the complementary color to blue,” she says.
When I am gone on a business trip, she calls me on my sixth day away. “James, it’s four o’clock,” she says.
“Yeah, I won’t be able to leave until tomorrow,” I say. The faint hum of a long-distance phone call floats between us until she sniffles.
“You have to come home now, James,” she says. “Tomorrow will make it seven days.”
I drive five hundred miles and arrive home at midnight. I knock on Martha’s bedroom window. She smiles at me and closes the drapes. I leave for my bamboo mats when the light in her room turns off.
When Martha’s frail body refuses to move from bed, I enter her half of the house for the first time in twenty-five years. She had changed the sarongs and sheets hanging over the gaping entrance over the years until she had finally called a maintenance company to fill in the hole with a concrete wall. She still sleeps on her half of the bed as if waiting for me to fill the other side. Her brown hair streaked with gray fans out on her pillow like a headstone.
“Are you ready to die, James?” she says
I shake my head and wait, holding her hand to make ten grasping fingers. She spends forty-two days gasping for breath and refusing to be taken to a hospital. She dies on the forty-second day waiting for me.
Fifteen days after her death, I put half of her ashes in her side of our house and the other half on my side. I finish the job she had started twenty-five years ago, and I demolish the two standing structures to make one heaping pile of ruble.
On the seventeenth day I buy a one-story house with three bedrooms