Interfictions 2

by Delia Sherman

  Amanda doesn't have to read the last one: Guilty. It's from August 9th, 1938, and nobody bothered to cut it from the newspaper like the others. The kids can read advertisements for $50 refrigerators if they want to, but they're all just staring at Mr. Macek's horrified expression instead.

  August 9th, 1938—the day Mrs. Macek, mortified by her husband's guilt and their neighbors’ reaction, ordered the children to take whatever they could carry and stuff it into the car. The day they left everything behind, not just dishes and pictures but questions, too. The day the doors clattered, the lights dimmed, and the house was left to itself.

  "Cool!” says Michael. “It's a Kill House!"

  The house hates to be called that.

  "I wonder where he did it.” He looks around, grinning. “I bet there's a ring of blood still in the tub."

  He leaves to go check and Amanda follows.

  Jeremy squints at the newspapers and says to nobody, “Wait. These newspapers are from Ohio."

  He follows his friends, silent now as though afraid to wake up the house, and steps gently down the hallway, looking into each of the bedrooms. Blank patches on the yellow wallpaper show the ghosts of pictures fallen from the walls.

  The first bedroom looks like three boys shared it, two in bunk beds and one in his own. Their dresser drawers are still open with pants and sweaters spilling out of them, and metal toy soldiers lie wounded on the floor. Jeremy picks one up but then puts it back.

  The second bedroom seems to have been for the girls of the family, two of them if the beds are any sign. They'd left everything behind like their brothers had: a few drawings from school hang crookedly above one bed, and a bundle of letters tied in a pink ribbon rest on a nightstand beside the other. The letter on top has the print of someone's lips. Amanda holds it up and sniffs it.

  In the master bedroom, the blankets are thrown back from one bed but the other is still made. An old clock has wound down, dying three minutes past eleven. An oval dresser mirror leans away from the wall, its left half broken away. Rusted hairpins lie beneath. A closet door swings from one hinge. Metal hangers dangle between coats and dresses with ragged sleeves.

  Michael leans over a nightstand to pick up a wallet. It's the one Mr. Macek had taken from his overalls when the police came. He flips it open. It has long ago been emptied of cash, but he grins and slips it in his pocket anyway.

  "What are you doing?” asks Jeremy.

  "I'm just taking a little something away, that's all. A real-life murderer's wallet."

  "You can't just take that."

  "It's not like he'll need it. Guy's long been executed."

  The walls of the house creak as though resisting a heavy wind. Through the windows, however, the leaves hang motionless.

  "Put it back.” Jeremy points, his finger shaking.

  "It's like robbing a grave,” says Amanda from the doorway. “It isn't right."

  Michael laughs and steps backward. He jumps up onto a bed and spreads open his arms. “You gonna take it from me?"

  The house wishes the ceiling hadn't already collapsed above him some half a decade ago.

  "Come get it, Amanda,” Michael says, swaying his hips.

  Jeremy and Amanda trade glances and frown. Then they both step forward.

  The bed creaks beneath Michael's weight as he bounces on his heels. The tired wooden frame finally gives way and he falls backward to the floor, crunching on broken glass. He groans though he isn't cut. The house had hoped otherwise but then it realizes that it doesn't want to carry a corpse to Florida.

  Jeremy pulls the wallet from Michael's hand and sets it back into the dustless square on the nightstand while Michael staggers to his feet.

  "I could be dead,” he whines. “Stupid kill house."

  Neither of his friends say anything. Quiet and maybe embarrassed, they return to the kitchen and climb back out through the window.

  Michael stomps the faucet before slithering through.

  * * * *

  The hardest thing about crawling across the country is keeping plumb. Even if you're a good 1921 Craftsman-style bungalow, your beams and crosspieces will be torqued to their limits over all that terrain in all that weather.

  Tornadoes hit in Georgia, some forty years after the house leaves Ohio. By now, the house is gray and its siding curls at the ends like a dead man's fingernails. The wind, green with stolen earth, blasts through the broken windows and tears the curtains away. Moss on the roof peels from the corner like a scab before tumbling into the vortex.

  The hail rattles against the roof. The rain shoots sideways through the door. The newspapers dissolve. The couch bloats.

  With nowhere for the wind to grab hold, the tornadoes move on to more satisfying victims. They wobble away, leaving the house bewildered in the middle of a field.

  The house gathers its wits and crawls away through the broken branches, onward to Florida.

  * * * *

  There aren't houses like this house near Fernandina Beach, and you'd think it would be embarrassed. It isn't. The clean adobe houses in the retirement community are full of Formica and fiberglass, slathered pink and teal with concrete seashells hanging by their doors. They've never had a baby born inside. They've never seen a really good teenage argument or a night of gin spilled in the master bedroom. Their pastel walls flicker with reruns.

  The house sticks to the woods on the edge of the development, circling from the north and sensing the last of the Macek family, the commander of the toy soldiers, Julian Macek.

  * * * *

  Of course he likes to walk still, young Julian. He always liked it back in Ohio, even in the middle of the night. He'd sneak out of his window and patrol his town like an amateur watchman. Of course he still does that today, eight hundred miles and seventy years away.

  Now he carries a broom handle walking stick. He's driven a finishing nail headfirst into the end, just the thing for spearing a paper cup or an attacking animal's eyeball. He shakes it much like his father did at the kids who rush past his house on their bicycles and skateboards, not quite sure if he's missing something important and American.

  The house watches Julian on his daily patrol. He follows the walkways through the golf course though he does not play. He squints at the other old men in their plaid hats and white shoes, sometimes raising the broom handle at them in either salute or warning. They chuckle and wave back.

  The house realizes that it has never thought of how to call attention to itself. On windy days, you can hear the groan of rotting joists and the whistle of split shingles, but the air is stagnant during the Florida summer and the high drone of locusts would conceal them anyway. It can't whistle or snap its fingers, and houses can only whisper to their occupants.

  After a week of waiting fifty yards off the seventh hole for Julian Macek to get a funny feeling on the back of his neck, the house decides to risk everything and just edges its corner onto the fairway.

  Julian Macek sees it first one rainy morning. His broom handle clunks upon the concrete but stops about thirty feet from the house. He stoops, peering past the pine trees and curving palms at the leaning wreck, more snail than house.

  Julian looks over his shoulder to the left and then to the right. He steps across the grass and touches the corner. A charge crackles along the old cloth-sheathed wiring.

  Come inside, the house wants to say.

  Julian limps around the house, examining every side: the missing back steps, the jagged windows, the wavy porch planks. The house waits and hopes for any sign of recognition.

  Julian staggers back, holding his hand over his mouth. He bends gasping toward the ground while the house worries.

  I traveled a long way, the house wants to say. Come inside.

  Julian's face is white, but he steps onto the porch and tries the door. The last few months of humidity and vibration have finally rusted away the tumblers in the lock. The knob falls into Julian's hand and the door swings open.

  Come inside. />
  Julian, holding his broom handle like a spear, walks into a living room he last saw over his mother's shoulder. He grimaces at the kitchen table. Cans and candy wrappers crunch under his feet as he shuffles from one room to the next.

  In the master bedroom, he picks up his father's wallet in his shaking hand. He opens it, sees the Ohio license, and then drops it to the floor.

  He runs now through the house, crashing into one wall and then the next, clutching his narrow ring of white hair. He drops his broom handle in the hallway. He slips on the mold-slick carpet and crawls the rest of the way from the house.

  Wait. Wait.

  Julian Macek, the son of a convicted and executed child murderer, scrambles for his life from his childhood home.

  * * * *

  That's not the way it was supposed to go at all, thinks the house. Confession turns out to be harder than it expected.

  The house has a speech prepared, though it has no way to deliver it. “We're brothers, you and I,” it would like very much to say. “Maybe we both crawled to get here, but we're both still standing. We wouldn't have made it this far carrying the things we know if your father hadn't done a good job. He was for building things, not destroying them."

  But eloquence doesn't come easy to a house when all its words are only architecture. There's only so much to say by standing still, by still standing.

  Just as the house resolves to finish the journey and crawl the quarter mile to Julian's backyard, a flashlight beam bobs over the fairway, coming closer. Julian, a bottle in one hand and the light in the other, cracks his knees against the porch and curses. He totters back and walks up to the door.

  "I've spent my whole goddamned life running from you, and now here you are,” he says, narrowing his eyes to focus through the dusty glass.

  You didn't have to, the house wants to say. That's what I've come to tell you.

  Julian can't hear it, of course. He stomps into the house, crunching across a fish skeleton from somewhere in Kentucky. He glares down at it confused. Then he stops at the doorway of the room he shared with his brothers, dead twenty years ago. He bends to the floor and picks up one of his old soldiers. Clutching it in his fist, he continues to his parents’ bedroom.

  There he sways, staring at their beds.

  "I watched everything I did, just in case,” whispers Julian. “I stayed away from children, even my own, just in case. I stayed away from girls. I married late, too late. I yelled and fumed to let out whatever he might have given me. All I wanted was to forget him, but here you are to remind me."

  It was me, the house wants to say.

  "Is this like the mystery stories? The scene of the crime comes back to visit the criminal?” Julian stamps his foot and pipes clank against the beams.

  The house tenses, hoping he'll hear, hoping he'll do it again if he doesn't.

  "They already got him,” shouts Julian. “Are you happy?"

  No, thinks the house. I killed her.

  Julian shatters the bottle against the wall and vodka soaks into the yellowed wallpaper. He watches it, considering. Then he stoops and flicks open a lighter. Flames crawl up the wall.

  Julian's father built the house almost entirely from wood that came on a truck as a kit from Sears. Niklas Macek, a skilled carpenter, carefully fitted each piece to the other and nailed them square enough to travel eight hundred miles farther than any architect had ever imagined.

  Fire scurries from joist to joist and beam to beam while the insulation smolders. Paint bubbles on the walls in streaks. Plaster crumbles and furniture flares. The house holds together.

  Julian stares at the empty squares where the family portraits once hung. Mama died soon after the move. Anja and Maria left as soon as they could, marrying the first cretins they met, hoping to start better families than their own. Theodore ran away to the war, and Peter was spacey and silent the rest of his life. They're all dead now.

  The house can't get away, even if it wanted to, not with fire to spread like typhoid anywhere it goes. It can't just die, either, not yet, not with Julian still mistaken.

  The house inhales. Hot air flows up to the attic and cool air sucks in through the broken windows. It has no lungs or voice box, but the fire itself will have to do. Maybe a ten penny nail shrieks from two boards prying apart or expanding gases split an ancient rusted pipe; all the house knows is that it manages a single scream—one very much like Kathy Henderson's all those decades ago.

  The difference is that someone hears it this time. Julian spins to his left and to his right, looking for the source. Was there someone still in the house? His worry clears his mind enough so he can race from room to room to find her.

  Of course it is a her.

  Unable to find anyone, Julian lopes outside and searches around the foundations. He bends to check the crawlspace, and glowing embers barely show the pipe, black and rusty and blood-stained. Can he see?

  She crawled under after a cat, the house wants to explain. One of the calicos from Mrs. Pettyjohn's yard. She crawled under and cracked her head. She bled all over, and I couldn't stop it. I'm sorry. It happened so fast, too fast for a house.

  Julian crawls backward to escape the crashing beams and soaring sparks, and the house wonders if he understands. Blood and mud and rust look a lot alike, after all. It's a long shot, much like coming all the way to Florida in the first place. Julian does look amazed, surprised, his eyes wide. He doesn't look as slumped and heavy, at least.

  Relieved, it settles exhausted into the fire and sleeps.

  * * * *

  "Remembrance Is Something Like a House” started as a crime tale with a supernatural element, a house crawling across the country to confront a murderer. I had a tough time finding the correct voice and point of view in the first few attempts, but everything changed when I said, “To hell with it. I wonder what would happen if I told it from the perspective of the house?” It was a strange, risky, and counterintuitive choice—one I couldn't have made earlier in my career when I was still scared to break rules.

  If “Remembrance” is anything to go by, interstitial fiction is fiction that, regardless of the tropes and traditions involved, taps into universal emotions with a certain verve, awe, voice, enthusiasm, risk, and abandon—a tossing aside of normalcy in the brave pursuit of some aesthetic or thematic end. Interstitial stories tend not to care what genre they belong to, what traditions they confront or invent, what audience they find. Their writers have simply written with every tool they've got: robots, ghosts, creeping houses, whatever. They've held nothing back, even risking embarrassment or failure.

  "Remembrance” is good only because I took a big, scary chance that it would be bad. Perhaps that is what makes interstitial fiction so powerful.

  Will Ludwigsen

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  The Long and Short of

  Long-Term Memory

  Cecil Castellucci

  It had been forty-six years since Dunbar had visited the moon. He stood in his bathrobe at the scenic window taking in the view. The black sky, the craters, the landscape were exactly as he remembered.

  He cursed.

  * * * *

  Dunbar was a research scientist at McGill University. He thought it was funny that he was studying the biology of memory in Quebec, a province whose motto was “I remember.” He saw it everywhere on the license plates. “Je me souviens."

  I remember.

  Dunbar remembered many things from his past. He remembered his first telephone number. The number of steps from his front door to the playground two blocks over. The exact color of his shirt when he graduated from sixth grade. The words to the poem “Kubla Khan.” The way the first car he owned had to be finessed when he shifted from first to third.

  Je me souviens.

  Was the province worried that it would forget? What would it forget? Dunbar could find no clear answer.

  He had come here to study memory so that he could learn how to forget.

  * * *
*

  "One interesting aspect of animal and human behavior is the ability to modify behavior by learning."

  "There are two kinds of memory. There is declarative and procedural."

  "The number of neurons in the brain is 10 to the power 10. Each neuron in the brain receives, on average, 2,000 to 20,000 synapses, or connections, from other neurons."

  "Every human brain has the same general blueprint for organization, but the experiences that you have make every single brain unique."

  Each semester, Dunbar told his students all of these things in his Intro to Neuroscience lecture. It was always the same lecture, because even if more and more was discovered about the mechanics of memory, the basics didn't change.

  Each semester, the students were the same. They sat, sleepy eyed, scratching the words that he said into their notebooks or laptops, hoping that something that he said would be on the exam.

  He wanted to tell them that there was no way to be sure that we remembered anything correctly; something would be lost, something would be discarded.

  But in the end something would also be retained. Even if it was something that you wanted to be forgotten.

  * * * *

  Slide 1: The Neuron

  * * * *

  * * * *

  "The neurons in the brain produce action potentials. In other words, they secrete neurotransmitters to communicate with each other at the synapses. The chain of neurons creates various neural pathways. Some neural connections are stronger than others and they can be modulated, or changed, following learning or during behavioral modifications."

  * * * *

  DUNBAR: How do you choose what you remember?

  DUNBAR: Which pathway in my brain is the one that holds that memory?

  DUNBAR: Scientifically, how do I answer this question?

  * * * *

  Often, he asked himself these questions. All he knew was that the brain retained information if it was interesting and exciting. If it wasn't, then it would ignore it.

  * * * *