Home Improvement: Undead Edition

The Mansion of Imperatives JAMES GRADY

That three-story Gothic mansion rose like a hulking mirage from the desolate snowy prairie east of Montana’s blue misted Rocky Mountains.

Five people came there that winter Friday.

Louise hoped rehabbing the old house with their friends Bob and Ali would spark a paternal instinct in her husband, Steve.

Steve hoped fixing up the deserted relic would get his wife off his case and let him hang out, that’s all, just hang out with Ali, Bob’s willowy wife.

Ali was there because doing what Bob wanted kept her comfortable.

Bob told himself that it was okay to keep secret how he was going to work their group investment because he was the guy who always turned a profit—and had the bankroll, the blond wife, and the do-gooder plaques to prove it.

Parker stood in the front yard outside the mansion that cold gray morning as Bob said, “What do you mean you’ve never set foot in here?”

“Wouldn’t go in fifty years ago,” said Parker. “Won’t go in now. Stood here then watching Mom yell at my old man ’bout how he come to architect for Mister Rich—who had some heart attack, left this hulk and his fortune to my old man. Dad wouldn’t quit here for us. Saw him push Mom off that front porch. Watched her disappear day by day, die waiting for him to come to his senses. After the UPS guy found him froze like a statue here last month, if I didn’t need your money, I’d let this damn place rot to dust.”

“We won’t work in your pickup or our rental car,” said Bob. “If a storm is coming down from Canada, the longer you argue about that, the harder it will be for you to drive the thirty-seven miles back to town.”

“You folks really plan on staying here all night?”

“For four nights,” said Bob. “Power’s on—drafty, but the furnace works. Got a portable heater, fuel. Sleeping bags, food. Four nights now in December gives us ten percent of our ownership as occupants during our first calendar year—the minimum requirement for the homesteading tax credit.”

Bob didn’t say, And with the hardware store receipts plus date-stamped pictures of us working, we prove renovation, increasing our equity.

He told Parker, “Either you come in or we’re all out.”

Parker clumped up the porch steps as if he were climbing a gallows. Louise handed him coffee from a thermos they’d filled at a Starbucks 110 miles away in Great Falls. The four friends had flown into Great Falls the day before, from Denver. She followed Parker and Bob into the dining room with its legacy of scarred furniture that included a document-covered table.

Steve laughed while Ali strapped a tool belt around his waist.

Louise caught the glow in her husband’s eyes.

Bob gets off on seeing that fire in other men.

Louise shook her head: Why did I just think that?

Montana recognizes legal verification other than notarization. A digital movie camera recorded the four friends processing sales documents with the mansion’s heir. Parker wanted to sign, sign, sign and skedaddle, but Bob insisted on explaining each document to forestall future lawyers.

Fifty-four minutes later, Parker yelled, “Done!”

The front door swung open. They all hurried to its gaping view.

Outside snowflakes parachuted down like an invading army.

“But there’s no wind yet,” said Steve. “What opened the door?”

“Old houses,” said Bob. “They’re always settling.”

Parker said, “I’m so outta here!”

Louise grabbed his arm. “You can’t drive in a whiteout!”

Her husband, Steve, pushed the door closed.

Damn my logic, thought Louise. She didn’t know why.

And again the door swung open.

“Whoa,” said Ali. “That’s weird.”

As with a great whoosh, wind rose in the storm.

Bob closed the door. “Parker, if you die out there, the sale gets stalled in your probate. That blizzard will swallow you. What could be worse?”

“I don’t wanna know.” From his shirt pocket Parker fetched a steel lighter and a hand-rolled cigarette. The herbal smoke he exhaled revealed marijuana.

Bob said, “You’re getting stoned? Now? Celebrate at home!”

“Ain’t celebration.” Parker took another hit. “Medication.”

The door rattled.

“Didn’t think the wind was blowing that hard,” said Steve.

“Not thinking’s the way to be here,” said Parker. “My old man didn’t hole up here because he was a drunk. He drank because he holed up here. Staying outside or being stoned makes it harder for the thinking to get you.”

“Look,” said Bob. “Thoughts, voices, whatever you hear—”

Ali asked, “Why did you say that?”

“—doesn’t matter,” continued Bob. “We gotta fix this place up fast. Seal ourselves in or this storm will turn us into icicles. The leaky windows in the upstairs bedrooms: no time to replace them, but we can cover them up.”

Louise heard her husband, Steve, say, “Ali and I’ll do it!”

“Good,” said Bob. “Louise, help me Sheetrock that basement insulating wall Parker’s dad didn’t finish.”

Breaking glass!

They ran into the dining room and found the popped-off-the-wall shelf that Ali and Steve had laughingly named “Look-out Ledge” when they stacked it with bottles of red wine, the smoky Scotch Lauren ached to give up for motherhood, and the vodka Bob favored because it never breathed the secret of its sip. Plus Diet Coke and tonic water and two six-packs of beer.

The plastic bottles of Diet Coke and tonic water had survived—one Diet Coke bottle rolled across the floor to greet the five of them running in.

The liquor bottles were a jumble of broken glass cupping tiny pools of red wine.

Parker said, “Looks like you guys just lost your medical protection.”

He stubbed out the joint on the lighter and put them in his shirt pocket.

“Leave this mess,” said Bob. “We gotta work. It’s getting colder.”

Bob led them to the living room and their stack of delivered hardware supplies, their luggage and sack lunches and read-on-the-plane newspapers.

He handed Parker a hammer. “We’re all trapped in a house that needs fixing. Rip out the molding, reframe that window to keep out the cold.”

Parker shrugged: “If you gotta, you gotta.”

Steve grabbed a roll of plastic weathersheeting, duct tape. He would have dashed up the two flights of stairs to the bedroom level except Ali floated up the steps with that long-legged languor Steve didn’t want to miss.

Louise blinked: No, that wall didn’t just pulse.

Bob led her to the basement while their spouses climbed to the third floor with its wide-open stairwell bordered by a railing-protected corridor. Steve looked down the huge open shaft. Felt the vertigo of its inviting depth.

He and Ali worked on the smallest bedroom first.

“Like a cage in here,” said Ali.

Steve spun the rolled weathersheeting so an end flopped down.

Ali lifted a utility knife from the tool belt she’d strapped onto this muscled man who seemed less boring than her husband. She cut a translucent sheet, held it over the only window. Cold air blowing in from outside flapped the plastic and goose-bumped her flesh. She heard Steve ripping free strips of duct tape from where he loomed behind her hips.

Why did I think of it like that? she wondered.

Felt him brush against her as he bent to tape and seal all the edges.

“We’re done here.” Steve stared at her. “This is a kid’s room.”

She felt her goose bumps receding as the now-sealed room warmed, wondered if he noticed her nipples had yet to go down under her sweatshirt. Then she heard herself share a secret out loud: “Kids cut into your chances.”

“And all you can do is screw them up.” Never even told Louise that, thought her husband, Steve, as he led Ali to the second bedroom.

Where, in the dust and cobwebs stirring with the drafts from two windows, the bed was big enough for a surging teenage boy.

Ali said, “Feel the furnace? Like it started blasting more heat.”

Steve swallowed as she slid the zipper on her hooded sweatshirt down, down, spread her arms wide as she took it off.

For no reason she knew, Ali shook her blond hair free from a ponytail so it fell across her blue denim shirt with its pearl-white cowboy snaps.

Steve shook his head. I want “driving down the highway, white hash lines coming at the windshield,” and it’s the going, not the getting anywhere.

White pearl snaps.

They plastic-sealed the two windows against the howling wind.

Work together, Ali thought. It’s harder for the world to win if it’s more than just you. She felt like she was back in the trailer park, a girl hearing Gramma turn up the radio for some “Sealed with a Kiss” song. Ali knew how to do that, had done it and it wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t that kiss.

Ali said, “We should . . . keep going.”

“Yes,” answered Steve. Yes. White hash lines. White pearl snaps.

They walked the corridor along the third-floor railing. Rising from the living room came the whump-ruh sounds of Parker ripping out molding.

As Ali led Steve into the third, the last, the master bedroom.

Whump-ruh. Whump-ruh.

That bedroom door slammed. Closed. With them inside.

“Old houses—always settling,” repeated Steve.

“Sure,” said Ali. “Sure.”

Covering the first window, Steve held the plastic in place while Ali taped it to the wall.

The heat swelled in that closed room. Steve shed his outer shirt. Its flannel smell sweetened the air for Ali as Steve savored the whiff of coconut shampoo from that morning at the motel when she’d showered naked.

Ali went between Steve and smudged glass to seal the last window.

Feels like I’m stoned, she thought as she finished. Her hips brushed Steve’s loins. She turned. Her breasts brushed his arm. Don’t think yes.

Like a tear, a bead of sweat trickled down from her temple.

Steve saw his fingertips catch that drop on her cheek.

She sucked in his finger.

Then he was kissing her, she was kissing him. White pearl snaps popped like machine-gun fire as he ripped open her shirt No! she said pressed his hands to her swollen breasts. Oh she pulled open his jeans Don’t want he whispered as she leaped onto his neck like a vampire while he pulled off her jeans and panties, her legs thrashing them down to her still-on boots. They crashed onto the bed. Dust billowed. His mouth devoured her she knew she’d never come like this over and over again Stop she pulled him deep into her and it was like he’d never been this good, had this so good Want Highways and Not Him and they cried out came collapsed on the bed.

Knew that in this house, they’d do that again and again and again, like running their hands along the bars of a cage until their fingers bled.

Whump-ruh. Whump-ruh.

“Listen,” Bob in the basement told Louise. “Guess Parker can work.”

“He’ll do what it takes to get out of here.” She positioned a sheet of drywall against the wooden studs of an insulating wall.

“Yeah.” Bob reached for a hammer. “Took fifty years, but his dad ran out of the money he inherited with this place a few weeks before he died.”

“We could fix the house up to live here,” came out of her mouth.

“Who?” Bob drove a nail through the drywall to the stud. “All of us? Forget that. Me and Ali? Sticking us in Nowhereland isn’t our deal. You and Steve? The only thing he’d want about this place is the hundred miles of highway between here and any job he could get, and one day driving that much road, he’d just keep on keeping on.”

“Somebody’s gotta live here!”

“Damn, Louise, what’s your problem?” Bob hammered in a nail.

“I . . . don’t know. I felt like . . . Somebody’s gotta keep this place going.”

“That’s not our flip.” Bob hammered in counterbeat to the noise upstairs in the dining room, the only noise that was close enough to hear.

Louise knew that look on Bob’s face as they positioned new drywall. That was his ain’t-I-cool look that paid off only if he confessed.

“What’s going on, Bob?”

Whump-ruh. Whump-ruh.

Bob worked his hammer, too. “I was going to tell you guys when we got back to Denver. If I’d told you before, you might’ve settled for less than the big payoff.

“Didn’t you wonder,” he said, “who’d want to buy this nowhere place from us for enough cash to make us fixing it up worth our while?”

He hammered Sheetrock into place.

Said, “You know the Nature Preservation League?”

“You’re on its national board of directors.”

“If the economy’s going green, green is how you gotta go.”

“What did you do?”

“Our names aren’t on the deed, just the limited partnership for a place that’s being rehabbed as a ‘luxury getaway home.’ Figure the stats of a mansion, pictures of rehab happening, and the ‘paper worth’ becomes what it could be if this was what it’ll never be, which is paradise.

“In five weeks, NPL will announce they’ve bought the land all around here for a new edge-of-the-mountains preserve. Of course, a house smack in the middle of that fucks up the NPL plan, so the board—”

“Which you’re on.”

“—so the board will offer the owners of this being-fixed-up mansion a buyout of what the place would be worth—”

“If this place were that paradise,” said Louise. “Board member you will make sure it happens. And the rest of them will never know.”

“Everybody gets what they want! We’re doing well by doing good. This house gets rehabbed back to nature for people to love forever.”

“I want something to love forever,” whispered Louise from her bones.

“No forever here,” said Bob. “This house is headed to the bulldozers.”

She said, “Why is it so quiet?”

“That asshole upstairs quit working,” said Bob.

Louise left him in the basement.

Walked upstairs.

Alone.

Bob swung his hammer, Bam!

His plan was beautiful. Bam! Perfect. Bam! Nothing could stop—

Screaming!

Upstairs!

Bob ran from the basement to where Louise stood in the living room.

To where Parker sprawled on his spine in an oozing pool of blood, the back of his head impaled by nails jutting from a chunk of discarded molding.

“Holy shit!” Bob checked: no heartbeat, no breathing. Stared at the chunk of wood jutting from under Parker’s head, knew nails on the other end of the wood stuck deep into that skull.

Bob nodded to other chunks of wood scattered around the room.

“If he hadn’t been stoned, if he’d worked neat, not left trip-and-fall-on-me danger lying around . . . Easy explanation.”

Clumping feet ran down two flights of stairs.

Ali charged into the room, stopped.

Louise wondered, Why is she looking at Bob and not the body?

Ali cried, “Tell me what happened!”

Her husband said, “An accident. Must have been.”

In ran Steve, wearing his Bruce Springsteen concert T-shirt that had been under his flannel shirt. Louise thought, Why is Bruce on backward?

Bob pulled his cell phone from its belt pouch. “No signal.”

The blood pool oozed toward them.

Louise suddenly knew Steve would never give her morning sickness.

Ali stared outside at the raging blizzard. “What are we going to do? We can’t get to help and help can’t . . .”

“We figured to be here four days,” said Bob. “Now we got no choice. No phone. Heat, enough food, but . . . We can’t live in here with a corpse.”

Bob and Steve zipped into their ski parkas. Put on gloves.

Dragged the body through the door held open to the storm by Louise.

The chunk of wood stayed nailed to Parker’s skull.

Louise wiped clean the fogged glass of the newly framed window to watch Bob and her just a husband drag the corpse through shin-deep snow to Parker’s pickup.

Steve and Bob plopped the corpse in the pickup’s passenger seat. The wood chunk nailed to a skull bumped the rear window. They slammed the pickup door, then struggled through bitter cold swirling snow to the house.

“It’s over,” Bob told everyone as he and Steve shed their coats in the front hall. “Done. Tragedy, but it ain’t the being dead, it’s the dying, and we’ll get through the storm—Hell, fix the place up. The probate will work as long as we’ve got a straight story.”

Ali whispered, “What do I know?”

“Honey,” said her husband, “we all know . . .” Bob stared at his wife. “Why are your snaps done up crooked?”

Louise heard Steve say, “All this, what’s happening, it’s like . . .”

Steve shook his head. Like he couldn’t free the right words.

Ali reached out her hand to Bob. Whispered, “Please!”

He lurched toward her like a robot.

“Please get me out of here!” she told her husband.

Bob dropped to his knees before his wife. His strong hands cupped her perfect moon hips as he buried his face in the front of her jeans.

A bellow tore from Bob: “That’s not our smell!”

Bob rocketed to his feet, lifted Ali off hers. Threw her away.

Ali flew through the dining room crashed onto the table/bounced off it to the floor. Bob charged Steve, yelling, “That’s not the deal!”

Steve backpedaled as dizziness swirled Louise. She saw Bob slam into her husband, knock Steve onto the table, choke him.

Louise leaped onto Bob. He reared away from Steve to shake the wildcat off his back. Louise felt herself flung from him, flying—

Slamming into the dining room wall.

That absorbed her collision softer than wood should: Why—

Bob’s fist hooked toward her face.

As Steve swung the hammer and cracked Bob’s skull.

Bob crumpled to the floor.

Steve swung the hammer down on him again. Again. Again.

Stopped. Turned to look at his wife.

Louise saw her legal mate splattered with blood and bits of brain.

He dropped the hammer beside dead Bob, said, “You okay?”

“What’s happening?” she whispered.

“We had to do it!” yelled her husband. “Bob, he . . . he went crazy!”

Ali moaned on the floor across the room.

Louise helped her sit up and lean against the wall. Saw the bend in Ali’s arm that meant broken.

Steve loomed beside them. Said, “Is she . . . What happened upstairs . . . We . . . It’s like it’s all gone crazy in here! If you think about it—”

Louise whispered, “Parker said not thinking was the way to be here.”

“Parker’s dead,” said Steve.

“So is Bob.” She looked at her husband.

Steve pressed both hands to his temples.

“Story,” muttered Steve. “We just need . . . a story. Bob went crazy, killed . . . killed them, and we, we’re okay, we—Don’t want hate this place!”

Louise grabbed her husband’s blood-flecked arms. “If we know it’s here, we can hear what it knows.”

“What are you talking about? Ghosts? No such thing as ghosts. When you’re dead you’re dead, don’t want to die don’t . . . Wait.”

“Yes, wait: not ghosts. Not . . . people. The house! The house itself!”

Ali moaned.

The wind howled.

Steve staggered from the dining room where he’d killed a man to the living room where another man had been killed.

Louise ran after him.

Found him standing staring down at the floor.

“Blood,” he whispered to her. “We could clean it up. Make this place look great, be great, fix it solid again and . . . and . . .”

Sorrow twisted Steve’s face: “I didn’t want to fuck her!”

“Yes you did!” Louise grabbed his forearm. Dug her nails into his flesh. Felt the exertion push away wind in her skull. “Of course you wanted to fuck her! Everybody wants to fuck Ali! But you wouldn’t have because you want other things more even if—”

Doesn’t matter what I’m thinking if it was true before!

Louise blurted, “Even if you don’t want our baby to love forever! You care about other stuff enough to not fuck her except we came here!”

Match what makes sense with who you are, thought Louise. Use it like . . . like in that aikido demonstration on YouTube.

She yelled, “Parker realized it when he had a child’s mind! He stood outside and felt or thought something and knew enough to stay away and . . .

“His dad: maybe he pushed Parker’s mom away to save her!”

Words blurted from her: “Only needed him.”

“And then he ran out of money to keep you fixed up!” Louise yelled.

Steve blinked: “You . . . who?”

Louise grabbed him: “Us! The house hijacks our thoughts!”

Steve shivered.

Then she felt it, too, cold air, like . . .

She ran back to the hall between the living room and the dining room. The front door gaped open to the whiteout swirl of the blizzard. “Where’s Ali?” she whispered and ran to the dining room.

Found only Bob’s bludgeoned body.

Ran back to the hall where Steve stared out the open door.

Footprints in the snow led off the porch, past the white-mantled pickup truck, past their drift-buried rental car. Vanished in the blizzard.

“She chose,” said Louise. “Ali was that strong. Never realized—”

The door slammed shut in their faces.

Blessed heat circled them.

Steve said, “She broke the first imperative: self-preservation.”

Louise shook him. “Focus on what you knew before! Self-preservation isn’t the first imperative! Remember? Sophomore biology and the first imperative, the first imperative is preservation of the species!”

“You’re just saying that because you want to have a baby.”

Steve stepped toward her.

Louise took a step back.

Like we’re dancing.

“We don’t need a baby,” said Steve.

He took a step toward her. She took a step away.

His voice came out flat. Hammered. Fixed.

As he said: “We need a story for outsiders. To make them let us stay.”

“You want to leave me!” Louise backed into the living room and he danced with her. “Please remember you want to fuck Ali and leave me!”

Blood on the floor tried to stick her shoes to the wood.

“Just need our story,” he whispered. “Could say . . . Bob, Bob went crazy when we found out his plan.”

Louise stepped farther into the blood. “How do you know his plan?”

“And then he . . . he killed Parker and . . . and hurt Ali, that’s the truth! Tried to kill me and that’s the truth! But we fought him off and they’re all gone now and it’s just us and we have to, we’ll say we won’t let Bob steal our dream to fix this place up—we’ll say it’s in honor of Ali. And Parker!”

“No!” Louise stepped backward out of the blood pool.

Steve cocked his head. “Fixing all this could be a one-person job.”

He smiled. Held out his hand to her as he had for their wedding dance. Stood in sticky the color of raspberry swirls in their chocolate wedding cake.

Louise slapped his hand away. His boots slipped and his legs flipped out from under him. His crash shook the house.

The hammer Parker’d used. Lying on the floor by the newly framed window—No: not lying, moving, as like a wave, floorboards rippled to surf the hammer toward the blood pool and Steve’s waiting hand.

Louise ran up the stairs.

“Wait!” she heard Steve yell. “We can fix this!”

His footsteps charged up the stairs behind her.

She made it to the second floor. Raced up to the third, past bedrooms where visions of her husband fucking Ali fueled her fear with rage. She ran beside the hallway railing around the open space drop to the first floor.

Looked across that gap and saw Steve running after her, his face twisted and his fist full of hammer.

Stopped, as if on command, both of them crouching near the rail to glare across the stairwell chasm centering the heart of this crumbling house.

Across the chasm, Steve smiled: “Easy, hon. We’re home.”

Blasts of dust blew from the corners flanking Steve. Floorboards snapped up to slap back down again with a machine-gun racket as two energy waves rippled toward him. They met with a crack! and the wood he stood on exploded in splinters. The railing in front of him blew apart and the hole suddenly made in the mansion dropped him into the chasm of its heart.

He fell three stories without a scream.

Louise shut her eyes. Heard him land. Opened her eyes to a mushroom cloud of dust. She peered over the railing.

Steve lay sprawled on his back on the first floor, homicide’s hammer by his limp right hand, a railing chunk driven into his chest as another crimson pool formed around his outline.

You owe me filled her mind.

She ran down the stairs.

Okay, it’s all okay now, you’re okay.

“No!” yelled Louise as she ran down from the second floor.

You were always the one.

“Oh God oh God oh—”

Whatever created us must want us here. This must be right.

“Stop it!” yelled Louise as she reached the first floor of the house with two dead bodies. “I’ve got to stop thinking so I can see what to do!”

Flashes. Bob’s calculations of probate problems after Parker’s death just need a good story and protracted conveyance keeps bulldozers away and might use who comes to clean up—No, Louise can do it. Say: Steve went stir-crazy, murdered Parker, raped Ali, killed Bob, crumbling house saved her I saved you keep the place, live in it, fix me up tell rescuers it’s like getting back on the horse. Could work.

Louise ran for the door before the house got what she realized.

She had the door halfway open when it snapped rigid in its frame.

But halfway was wide enough for her to fling herself out into the blizzard. Cold bit her as the door slammed shut behind her. Snow swallowed her legs up to her shins as she stumbled down the porch stairs. Cold so cold Oh my God yes wonderful because it’s real! Snowflakes wet her skin and tried to refreeze. Thick white afternoon light let her see Parker’s snowburied pickup. Its steel handles burned her bare hands, but the driver’s-side door swung open to her pull and slammed shut after she was in, behind the wheel. Parker’s corpse sat rigid on the seat beside her.

The dead man stared at the windshield as her shaking hands fished in his shirt pocket . . . Yes! Found his lighter, a half-smoked joint and a small plastic bag. Her trembling hands clicked open the metal Zippo lighter, thumbed a blue flame, lit and hoovered a deep hit.

“Staying stoned makes it harder for the thinking to get you,” the dead man beside her had said. Hope he was right about that.

She took another quick hit before she stubbed it out: So little left!

I am freezing in a blizzard-trapped pickup with a dead man.

She saw a bulge in the left front pocket of the dead man’s blue jeans.

Keys! She leaned the stiff corpse against the passenger window, wriggled her hand into those jeans. The chunk of wood jutted from Parker’s skull but she knew, she really knew, that out here, such wood had no power.

The pickup ground to life, blew heat into the cab.

A quarter tank of gas.

Even with the chains on the pickup, even with four-wheel drive, she’d need to rock the pickup back and forth to create tire tracks to follow. Even if she found roads in the whiteout, that vehicular effort needed a full tank.

Like an electric cloud softened other voices in her brain.

Can’t drive away. Can’t stay here. Enough gas to idle for a couple hours. Don’t look at the dead man, his open eyes. Don’t look at the board nailed to his skull. She searched his pockets, found a few bucks, coins, and in that shirt pocket, a plastic bag . . . with another joint! Could stay stoned for . . . maybe until dawn. She checked her watch: three fourteen P.M. Make that until midnight. If I come in and out of the house, run the engine . . . every three hours . . . My mind and I will make it to dawn, maybe to the end of the storm.

Told herself: It’s not what the house can do, it’s what I choose to do. Only junk in the glove compartment. Nothing on the floor but the thirty-foot orange extension cord Parker used to connect an old-fashioned headbolt heater in the pickup’s engine to any building’s electricity.

Three hours. Stoned enough, staying strong enough, I can survive three hours in there. I can keep me. Louise turned off the pickup, left the keys in the ignition: one less trick for the house to play.

She ran from the pickup, stumbling through the eye-stinging snow and the knee-deep white powder that slowed her stumble up the steps and—

The house door refused to open.

Arctic air shook Louise so hard she fell into the snow on the porch. She ran back to the pickup, turned the engine on to blast heat over her, melting the snow and dampening her clothes cold, that’s cold, too, but—

Louise closed her eyes. Like Parker’d said: If you gotta, you gotta. She ran back into the storm carrying the orange extension cord, her mind playing the movie of how she’d tie one end to the porch or the door, tie the other end to the pickup’s front bumper, and it wouldn’t matter that the pickup could only charge a few feet, its horsepower against old wood—

The house door opened.

“Fuck you,” whispered Louise. “You get one chance.”

She backed off the porch, dropped the extension cord end far enough from the last step that it didn’t touch wood, tied the other end to the pickup’s bumper to show she meant business, ran back into the house.

The door slammed shut behind her.

Louise ran to the living room with its dried pool of Parker’s blood, with its stacks of four friends’ suitcases that had flown full of dreams from Denver, and sacks with their packed lunches and old newspapers, sleeping bags and the portable heater with a generator and a red plastic jug full of fuel oil that wouldn’t work in a pickup. She closed her fist around the plastic bag with its one-plus joint and metal cigarette lighter as she switched her wet clothes for dry garments, unrolled a sleeping bag.

MIDNIGHT.

Louise sat rocking back and forth on the decrepit mansion’s living room floor. She’d smoked all but an inch of the last joint. Felt her still chemical-addled mind mostly free from capture. To help, she’d crawled on her hands and knees, lapped up drops of the mixed brew spilled in the jumble of broken glass on the dining room floor near Bob’s body.

What more are you than the home you build for your life?

Can’t have a baby without Steve and who would want you now even if some rescuer comes. No rescuer’s coming. Not in time. And when someone does come, someone with a weaker mind than Ali oh poor Ali.

Lucky Ali. She knew how to use what she had to get what she could.

There’s what’s real and there’s what you believe.

What’s real is that outside in the cold she’d die in an hour.

What’s real is she could feel who she was slipping away.

Here could be home.

The something to love forever that’s been her lifelong dream.

If she keeps this place fixed up, the place will fix what she believes. She can come up with a story for all this.

After all, it’s what works, not what’s real.

She clicked open the metal lighter. Knew that was real.

Clicked it shut. Knew she was still here. For now.

Forever is a moment.

Like now. Louise clicked open the lighter.

And now. Clicked it shut.

The imperative to survive is all the house cares about.

The metal lighter clicks shut.

This is the moment you click open the lighter.

This is the moment you click it shut.

This is a moment when you’re still Louise.

Not some species of zombie slave.

She clicked the lighter open.

“We’re all trapped in a house that needs fixing.”

Bob said that. When he was alive.

He said, “It ain’t the being dead, it’s the dying.”

Louise thumbed the blue flame to life and fired up the last inch of the joint. Felt the house sigh.

Like, odds are, there’ll be more months of sunshine on its wood.

You could be not dead here for a long time.

All you need to do is let go of every imperative except existing.

Louise sucked in a caustic cloud of smoke.

Held it as the house trembled its floor to shake her balance.

Like a movie queen, Louise flicked her lit joint onto the pile of yesterday’s newspapers and birthed a flickering blue flame.

Dust and debris fell from the ceiling like smothering rain.

She grabbed the red plastic jug for the portable heater and splashed fuel oil through the room.

A ball of fire whumped up in front of her.

Fire consumed all the house’s thoughts as flames licked its walls.

Louise grabbed her coat, gloves. Fought open the front door that, unlike her, had no feet to flee.

And as she stood outside in the snowy night next to the inferno where a house once lived, unzipping her coat to heat from the blaze whose coals might glow long past dawn when rescue would or would not come, Louise hoped she was right about the worth of the imperative that to survive as who you are sometimes requires fixing your house with flames.