The Long Collapse
1
The strangle of inevitability seeps into the house through hairline cracks in the kitchen walls. Puffs of insulation tumble from slipshod ceiling tiles, pink, flaky little harbingers of the oncoming apocalypse. The stove sinks into the floor, forcing up a dark, vile sludge, a gravelly ganache of mud and muck oozing from the depths of a drowning foundation.
Its long crumble renders the house an obscurity. The lives we knew here rushed fast, forwardly, straight on ‘til grandeur. Even the most mundane detail took on lively and epic subtext; the pot roast and potatoes aromas, the dusty psychedelic sun-catchers, the bread box full of Little Debbie’s Oatmeal Pies, it all felt like it was leading us to something big, something significant, something in the cosmic neighborhood of Ne Plus and Nirvana.
Brick separates from mortar, beams pull away from bolts, paint peels into serpentine strips that reach out from the walls like the curling yellow fingernails of Nosferatu longing to drag you down to his moldy grave.
2
The walls soften; fontanelles sprouting up and down the pale like cavities across an overripe apple. You can push your finger right through the plaster, through the old damp wood, into the dense current of worms and insects that rumble around the house’s guts.
The foundation cracks, the structure leans left, the floorboards tremble and cave. The world falls out from under you.
3
The molecular breakdown is palpable. Wood swells, splits, splays like Thelonious, separating into dozens of disparate factions, each striking down its own pulpy path, moving on to reach its own conclusions, to start its own movements, to make its own kind of music. The house’s once unified weld of lugs and lumber has come asunder, turning itself over (and over) in mad surrender to the march and the momentum of revolution.
Find us likewise transformed; untethered spores riding crests on the zephyr; ever longer jet streams trailing vast and violet behind.
4
Fallen shingles litter an unkempt lawn. Vines entangle the porch, gutters and swing-set.
Standing in a house on the verge of collapse, brought back by the worst of circumstances, you feel yourself succumb (half willingly) to the browning wallpaper, the mossy faucets, the encroaching wilderness that eats incessantly into the edge of your vision.
Raymond Chandler blows in to guest-pen a line or two of your interior monologue: “Every story has an ending, kid. The long crumble claims us all.”
5
Hard winds whip through the space that no longer resembles our breakfast nook. You can practically hear the collective kerplunk as stomachs go woozy with nostalgia, with hazy longing, with the loneliness that wells in the wake of sudden realization.
Roof pours into living room, an avalanche of gook, soot and tar. The plush couch dies a dirty, undignified death.
The structure buckles, convulses, emits a low growl like the wail of ten-thousand Tibetan Monks howling into the void at the edge of the world. Pictures rattle loose, crash to the ground, creatures vacate the crannies.
Implosion.
Collapse.
Planet of Dust.
Smoke thins, a ghostly mist. The family stands in ruins, our cozy ramshackle gone full-on rubble. An eternity now to follow, the house fallen, already come and gone. Never to be known again.
