Termite House

Hare Kin

Content Warning:

Descriptions of gore, implied mental health issues, mention of suicide, mentions of murder

___

I haven’t been home in a long time. Not since I was eighteen and eager to escape the oppressive prison that it had been. I’ve had a whole life since then, thirty years away from home and every bit more meaningful, every choice mine to make, every outcome mine to own.

Yet here I am again. I've made and forgotten memories in equal measure, but I'm never able to quite scrub the persistent stain of my hometown from mind: my neighborhood, my parents, and this house with it's white stucco edifice and ochre fence, concrete tiles leading to a laughably short set of steps I used as one large one for as long as lived here. The metal screen is rusted with age and no longer white, just the pewtered copper beneath it. The garden is dead. It’d never had a life, really, the poor thing. Just a taste, until someone took it home and let it wither. I scoff at my own melodrama, shove my hands deep into the pockets of the dusty rug with sleeves I call a coat, and shuffle up the steps. Using my newly minted keys, I unlock the metal screen and the red door behind it.

I freeze in the doorway when the smell hits me. Nostalgia. Or dread. Whatever fucked up brainchild those things made, that’s what it is, sitting heavy in my gut and sending me a million eons away. I remember sneaking in and trying not to let the knob click against the latch, heart hammering blood into my ears so loud I doubt I could hear anything anyway, but knowing all the same the moment Mom heard me, feeling it like a prey feels they’re going to be eaten.

Breathing evenly, I rub my fingers against the grounding sensation of the denim in my jeans. A trick learned by my mid-thirties after struggling to figure out why I jumped a shadows. It rids me of the flashing images overtaking reality, eases the panic in my heart and prickling my veins, but it doesn't make her shadow go, lingering like lint caught in a lens in my peripheral. I try not to overthink it, know that every part of the circumstances leading to me being here is rife with just the type if unsavory details to make one paranoid.

They’re both dead. Good ole' ma and pa, that is, murder-suicide which seems fittingly dramatic to my memory despite the both of them being in their 70’s when it happened. You would think once someone ages, they’d calm down. Not my parents. They’d elected to get worse, evidently.

The house is still as neat, a shrine to the memory of Mom's almost violent level of tidiness. The hallway stretches its pristinely cared-for wood floor to a door that leads to an inanely deep closet that is doubtless piled high with now-useless clothing and coats and games and whatever else had been collected over the years. The staircase leading to the bedroom where my parents died is on my left, jutting out and curving sharply upwards once you were about a foot away from the closet.

Dread sharpens a knife on my gut at the reminder of it. I had debated calling a crime-scene cleaner or specialist to help me, but in the end, it was just not worth the thousands of dollars I don’t have. There being no other kin, no other sorry sap to help, I had decided to just do it myself.

I turn towards the archway leading to the living room instead. I have time. No one to crack the whip on this particular task.

I let my bag fall from my shoulder and onto the floor and slump towards the couch, noting with some annoyance that the scent of patchouli and tea tree oil is even stronger here, hanging over the room like a miasma, spotting my eyes with its intensity. I blink them out and shake my head, and the spots congeal, a figure in the corner of my eye.

I whirl around. Nothing. Just the corridor made dark, the stairs ominous, from the paranoid feeling of being watched. That’s it, that's all, it makes sense. I hate this place. I had left it as soon as I was able, and now I've been dragged back, kicking in screaming, my parents' last "Fuck you!". I need a break, and I haven’t even started yet.

My parents were so much of me, but their stay in my life was so brief- it feels like going to a strangers home, if not for how familiar the shiny wood paneled walls and stain-bleached carpet hiding pristine flooring is. The couch is still comfortable despite its age, probably because we had rarely been allowed use of it while Mom was alive. Later, that is. In the early years, she'd been much more lenient, watching Dad and I giddily pulling up our VHS-ripped Dragon Ball Z or, my personal favorite, Inuyasha, with a repressed smile of what am I gonna do? that gave her eyes a glimmer of undulating stars I loved. Love, I guess. It’s not like I ever saw it much later anyway. I’m allowed to love that still. Aren’t I?

My thigh vibrates and twittering bells resounds. I startle, sitting up and finding my phone from my pocket to smack answer.

“Lauren speaking,” I say, voice crackling like a smoker’s from disuse.

“Hey Lauren.” The smooth tenor voice of Davey-Dean cuts shivers through my brain, like the very words are scraping against it. My spine becomes ramrod straight in my back.

“Um- Davey, hey, what’s up?” I cringe at my own excited pitch, and to make up for it I add, “You know I’m off, right?” Davey-Dean being the only person at work who I'd told, of course he would know. He’s graceful enough not to call me on it.

“Yeah, sorry," he laughs, "I know you’ve got a lot on your plate but, listen- do you have time to talk?”

“Uh- yeah, I guess. What’s up?” Is that me, or is that concern I hear in his voice? I scold myself for hoping for it even as my stomach flutters excitedly.

“Ah, you know, I miss you,” he says. I grin uncontained. “And, you know... my wife, my ex, I mean, this week, she got me into some real bullshit.”

My grin dies. So does every emotion in me, each light snuffed with reality as sudden as city black out. Right. I let the silence stretch. I don’t know why, maybe hoping for more, but nothing comes. Just unspoken expectation. Black smears movement in the corner of my eye, probably one of those curtains fluttering free from the open window. I’m too busy struggling to remember how to be interested in this man and his problems to bother with it.

“...really.” I don’t know how to add inflection to my voice anymore. Davey-Dean notices.

“What’s wrong?” He asks, and the concern is so layered it feels fake. I laugh and it’s ugly and hollow.

“Nothing, Davey-Dean nothing. Tell me about your wife. I want to hear what silly shenanigans she cooked up this week while I mop up whatever’s left of my dad’s brains.”

Silence reigns, and guilt punches me in the gut to knock loose the apathy.

"Fuck. Have a good day. Sorry.” I hang up before I can shout at him anymore, the shadow of the curtain becoming so persistent against my peripheral it strikes a flame of annoyance so sudden and angry, I pivot to angrily shove it behind the couch, only to freeze. The curtains are neatly still and tucked behind the couch.

I breathe carefully, rub my fingers together when the denim doesn’t work, and remember where I am (my parent’s haunted house), who I am (Lauren King, 48, baker), and what I need to do (clean the place and sell it). It's nerves, that's all, just nerves. I don't even need to do anything but clean that one room. I'll sell this place to anyone, don't even care if it results in the demolition of everything, furniture and memories and all. But no one would touch a place with remains still staining the bedsheets. Determined to get it over with and get out, I find my bag askew on the carpet and pick through to find the gloves, the mask, tongs that I’m throwing out before the day is over, and keep the rest cleaning supplies in the bag to bring upstairs with me.

Gathering other necessities is easy. Like I said, Mom is a neat freak. Lugging it all up the stairs is pretty easy too, at least in the face of the cracked white door staring at me in challenge, crime scene tape peeling a little with age. It had taken the local force longer than I’d like to give me access, especially since they weren’t planning on helping any.

“Okay,” I breathe, and though the effect is lessened some by the silicon gloves on them, I rub my fingers together for comfort. I set my phone aside on the floor by the steps, then press the little button on my earbuds that allow the voices of Ari and Eli, the hosts of my podcast, to float through.

“He entered the LaRoccas’ room at night and-”

“Wait, wait, wait. How did he get in there?

“That’s the mystery! The whole house was locked up tight. Maybe he was already in the house, waiting for night to come.”

“Creepy,” I mutter, just in time with Eli. I smile a bit to myself. It may be a bit morbid to some to listen to women talking about a serial killer while cleaning the room where your mom shot your dad then herself, but it works to distract me from what it is I’m doing, makes me feel like I have a friend with me.

The room, when I open it, is... well, it looks like their room. Surprisingly in-tact, except for the shattered headboard where the bullet smashed through Dad into it, and the oxidized-brown-black stains and viscera still mostly on the bed. But besides that, pristine. The smell is much less so. The mask does nothing to suppress the way mulched eggshells and fecal matter and piss and well-past old meat dug out from the back of a fridge hits me like a truck of cloying rotting sweet intensity. Even still I can smell Mom's goddamned patchouli and tea tree cutting through it all. A finger of shadow flickers the corner of my vision for attention, but I ignore it. It’s nothing. It’s no one, just nerves. There is no one here but me.

“So the autopsy revealed Mrs. LaRocca’s wounds were pre-mortem. Mr. LaRocca had contusions on his wrists, was likely made to watch.”

“Ouch, damn. Why’s it always the gals, though?”

“Yeah, seriously! Give us a break- serial kill some dudes for a change!”

Their laughter is the backtrack of me circling around the bed, dragging my bucket of water and the persistent company of that shadow in my peripheral behind me. The clock on the bedside table is tipped over along with everything else on it, pills and papers and pens scattered to the floor, another smudge in my picture-perfect memory of their room. The lavender pillow and sheet set is completely ruined with stains and shrapnel, the bedframe beyond saving. It's real wood and doubtless soaked up the the dried black smear across its side. I notice with some relief that the gore is mostly located on the bed except, of course, where Mom had maybe slumped over and emptied her stomach contents out, a strange relief to me, that at least she felt some disgust with herself for what she did. But even still that thought is in contention with the annoyance of another mess of hers that I’d have to clean up. I pour some of the water on it, retrieve some bleach to spray on top and allow the fiber to loosen. The bed stuff, I decide to throw away. That will be easy.

I unfurl a yard bag and flick it open, the black plastic ballooning to obscure my vision. It obscures that persistent shadow, too, now large enough to seem almost like it’s standing beside me, a person crowding in too close. There’s no one there, though, no ghosted breath or wafting body heat. Just cold.

“So in the end, what happened to Mr. LaRocca?”

“Well... not much is reported. Man probably had some serious mental ‘b’ and took a break involving grippy socks and state-of-the-art fashion.”

Poor man. I wonder if there was anyone there for him to help clean up his wife. The raucous laughter peals tinnily from my headphones while I lean over the bed of my parents. The first resting place I knew, and their last. I allow myself some melodrama this time It’s actually kind of hard to see these stains, remember that they were once my parents. The shadow is my company as I scrub the floor, use the tongs to transfer bedding to bag, blood to water.

I don’t turn. I don't want to. Even if I could, I don't want to see who's there.