A very short story about walking into my house in (an attempt at) the style of Cormac McCarthy

disastertourism
Nov 6 · 3 min read

He steps out of the street and onto the cobblestone sidewalk swinging the unlocked wrought iron gate open and then, once he’s walked through, closed again behind him gently so that the clink of the chipped black metal doesn’t wake those he imagines to be lurking, trying to sleep. The flower beds at his feet are covered in mulch so old it turned grey years ago with all the moisture seeped from its bark, bleached by countless summers of bayou sun. But that slow crawling creek brought rain tonight and even though the bumbling wet fog rolled up so high into the sky that it turns to clouds has long lumbered passed to the next neighborhood etched into the side of the pulsing, seething, freeway, there’s enough water still left on the ground to stain the mulch so dark crimson and fresh that it looks like the tailgate just slammed shut earlier that day on the truck of illegals that shoveled it out. There are sticks and twigs in the beds; a graveyard whose bones portend that some manner of flowers or bushes or shrubs were at one point planted there but he doesn’t know when and nobody else does either. He climbs the three small stairs onto the porch while plunging his hands down into his jeans and the denim in his pockets is extra rough because they haven’t been washed since they left the store and he burrows down deeper trying to loose his keys from the fabric snag. The heel cap of his boots make the clack of a tap dancer out of rhythm on the porch’s wooden slats as he fumbles and digs while trying to maintain his gate and the whole scene is such that an observer might conclude the man was intoxicated only he isn’t except for maybe a little. For a moment there’s a pause and maybe one of those lurkers is stirring from their unseen slumber and rising and loping after him half dead and half awake and maybe this is the end but they aren’t and it’s not yet. Humidity eternal is dried up as those plumes of fog tumbled and rolled and behind them left a cold front so this is the one night of the year the air is as arid as the deserts further west and the keys slip and turn in the keyring as he struggles to grip them with his cold dry hands. Forced to a complete halt to finish unraveling that hummingbird nest of metal he lets slip with the breath of an exasperated exhale a mute curse so tired and lazy that it barely echos in return off the short, shiplap roof covering the porch and is lost somewhere amongst the low hum of the electric heat burning through the filament of the porch-light and the orchestral chirp of crickets ignorant to the fact that the turning of the weather means their songs tonight are their own elegy. Made impatient by his previously suffered delays, upon identifying and isolating the correct key, he pushes it into the deadbolt cylinder with an amount of force unnecessary to the task and begins to rotate it before even fully inserted. With his other hand he turns the spindle and pushes first just from his elbow until reminded how he hates that old red door that always sticks and he leans his whole shoulder into it forcing it free and sending him quick-stepping into a house as empty as he is.

disastertourism

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