An Inevitable Collapse

The house’s wooden bottom was layered with barnacles. The sea threw itself against its foundation of sagging and weathered beams.

No one really knows how long the house has left. After all, Rose absently muses, the house hangs out over the sea, woodwork soaked in salt water again and again. It’s not exactly conductive to preservation. After all, wood isn’t exactly grown with saltwater in mind.

The house has been there as long as she could remember. She thinks he was there back when her mom was a kid. That considered, the beams have been doing a fantastic job warding off the sea water with an armor of crustaceans; after all trees aren’t exactly designed to withstand the ocean.  And the old thing is still here.

Sometimes he doesn’t feel like something that was built; but…someone must have put the thick bubbled glass in the window frames, and set those frames into the house. Ah, Rosie’s thinking about the house like he’s a person again, probably should stop that, Mom sometimes jokes about that being a product of a unsound mind.

Funny thing to say, since everyone in the family does that (Except Grandma, back when she was alive.) Especially Grandpa. He’s even got a nickname for the place: Dylan. Sometimes Rosie catches him talking to a random cluster of windows. It’s never anything important, just “We went out to eat while we were in town, and my kiddo’s husband told a particularly good morbid joke, which I’m going to tell it to you in it’s entirety, except the important bit I forgot. Ah, we’re growing old together aren’t we Dylan. It’s not as fun as we’d thought it’d be.”

The sunlight would catch on his white poofy hair, dyeing it red, or a caustic yellow, or, rarely, a faint blue. More commonly, it was a tie-die pattern, three or four shades softly blotting themselves on him as he chatted with it about his day.   

The windows themselves are a little odd, now she thinks about it. Someone must have decided the house needed tiny windows for some unknown reason. Then they put them around the house in the most chaotic patterns and shapes that Rose has ever seen.

The sheer number of windows makes up for their diminutive size, but the light coming through is twisted. It’s bent by the bubbles filled with dark red, rust orange and shadowy purples caught in the glass. It makes it a bit hard to do detail things that require good eyesight. That’s what the oil lamps (whose smoke stains the innards of the house in mixing shades of black, with special focus on the ceiling) and outdoors are for.

(Maybe Dylan’s annoyed that we spend time focused on things that aren’t him.)

Electric lights? There’s a distinct lack of those, possibly because electricity in a house hanging over the ocean sounds like a death trap. It still doesn’t help with the ‘death to eyes’ effect the window lit house tends to have, especially when it comes to Grandpa. He won’t hear about Mom putting up curtains though. Says he owes Dylan more than that.

Rose has a standing theory that Dylan ‘sees’ the inside of the house through the windows, and that’s why Grandpa won’t cover them, even when they hurt his eyes.  

 The way the lights the windows cast crisscross as they drape themselves over the floor does has an intense ethereal beauty, so Rose thinks she knows why. These windows fill bits of the house with patterns of light boxed in with bits of shadows. So it’s like living in a live work of art. Maybe that’s where all of this started, the house feeling alive in an incredibly immediate way.

Sometimes he creaks in concerning ways, and people at the breakfast table glance at the ceiling and walls in concern. I’ve heard Mom and Grandpa worry about it collapsing into the ocean in a glorious finale. Possibly with us in it.

Grandpa’s terrified of losing Dylan, and Mom is more scared of losing us, the human part of the family. Once she had me take swimming lessons, trying to prepare for the eventual collapse.

I don’t think Dad is worried about that, but I’m not entirely sure why. He has to know it could happen, like the rest of us, but he’s never so much as argued with Grandpa’s ‘no replacing house parts, that’s like amputating part of Dylan’ policy.  Everyone else talks about how its collapse is a given, but Dad just laughs, and acts like it’ll stay there forever.

Mom was worried he would, when she asked him to move in with her and Grandpa (and Grandma, back then) but he loved the house and it’s ‘decrepit spookiness’. That’s what he calls the house’s atmosphere, well that and ‘uniquely, wondrously beautiful.’     

Sometimes I wonder if the house factored into marrying Mom. Then I remember what Mom’s like: dark hair falling in her wide, intense eyes, and the way his eyes follow her around the room, any room. So the wondering dies a thorough death every time.  

I found a paper once, in the house. I still wonder about it. It’s in Grandpa’s squiggly handwriting, jerky and beautiful. It’s not as frail and thin as his handwriting today, and the year written on it is old, from before I was born. There’s a Dylan in it, but not the house Dylan.

Dylan here is a boy living in town, a friend his dad started hiring to muck out the stables (a rotting mound to the left of the house nowadays) and then do repairs on the house (now a foreign concept). Then something went wrong. He’s not clear what exactly, but.

It’s Grandpa’s dad’s fault. That human Dylan is dead.

He died in the house. They never got the body back, but Grandpa’s friend never left. It doesn’t say whose fault that is. Possibly cause its not the worst thing that could happen. Not the worst end, for us anyway.

I started wondering, then, if we’re cursed to live here because of Grandpa’s dad. Then it slid out of my mind for months because well, it’s not much of a curse, is it?   

Honestly, I think I’d be okay with falling with the old thing, down into the angry sea.

Of course I hope it doesn’t happen, or more realistically that it falls after I die, but if Dylan goes down in my lifetime…. Yep, I’ve gotten stuck on a morbid streak again, maybe I should figure out how to get off it. Or maybe not, as everyone else living in our house is overshadowed with it, and all of them are fantastic in hundreds of tiny, uniquely beautiful ways.