MUDSLUGS

5614 Clover

A can of coke, a nearly empty box of stick pops picked through of all its best colors, and a fresh loofah are all that belong to the invisible tenants of Room 1 and Room 2. The third bedroom, our bedroom, holds only a full length mirror and the skeleton of a canopy bed. So that, the floor is a layout of our select wardrobe, food stuffs, and kitty litter. The cat is not to be released. Disregard her demon scrawling. 

Our temporary home is the last on an offshoot of two streets, the whole section grooved into the side of a cemetery so that the headrock of hundreds of bodies bite down gently around the neighborhood. The terrace of the house is dead people and berries. Dead people and ripe black-purple bombs that discourage anyone from terrace-using.

Its interior has been wiped down to grey. A sunken, sea-stricken sailor with the luminescence of a starved stomach. The flooring has the slick of fake wood, dark with pre-printed grain. Matching renters friendly roll-on paper is stuck onto the bathroom’s half scrapped tile. Like an exhibit  “currently under construction,”  where a copy of the scene is printed on fabric and stretched across, hoping that at a glance viewers buy the mirage. It peels up at the corners. 

The only peekaboo of what was is a red radiator. I imagine the house glowing with warmth,  aged paint and mush-brown tile laid in the seventies. A gas stove frying plantains and a pot of rice. Light spilling over dinner plates and well tended planters, the slight of cigarette smoke peeling through opened sliding doors. 

This feels like the beginning. Not the goodbyes, or beds I’ve slept in before. A good couple weeks cashed into my new job but here, this is the beginning. A well needed bit of calm in the absolute upset I’ve caused. For myself, to myself, some self-pity I will find no cure for. Maybe it’s the full tub that fills only half way that I had my first soak in, for years. Or the soft greeting of the crickets, but it’s a gentle wash.