Pictures Up on the Mantle/Nobody I Know

He grins
.               ;I took everything I grabbed from the House and organized it in the garage and I think you’re going to be really pleased with the stuff I found;

Spouse, I assure you, I am not pleased with a single thing that’s happened in the last week. I am not enthused to assess, clean, manage and live with any of these_{<no matter how practical>} cursed bits of legacy.

The spite will isn’t real, by the way. I am devastated.

I won’t go back there again. I cannot go back there again. I took the shirt she was married in. I don’t know why and I could not even muster a passably reasonable explanation to Dad_{<he was bemused, and maybe a little wary, asking>} for why I was doing it. I have washed and washed and washed my hands since I got home. The clothes that I entered that pit in are already in the washer. For real real this time, I will not reenter that place.

‘Where I used to live
Picked the lock on the front door
And felt it give’

It’s so wild how big the House is for me, but it is not a big house. It isn’t.

The aunt who doesn’t like me inexplicably showed up with a mop and bucket to this house full of decay and refuse and spent two hours mopping the parts of the kitchen and hallway floor that aren’t covered in trash. It’s hard to exaggerate how surreal it was to watch her march that bucket back and forth through the chaos. The mushrooms in the basement are greater than 6″ tall and for a while it looks like Bea was just throwing booze bottles down the stairs. It is a garden of glass, sown primarily in fifths of gin. We found a bag of teeth_{<probably my sisters; from when she got braces>} in a box of jewelry. there are just plastic buckets of _{<alarmingly already consumed>} black sunflower shells arrayed in the piles in the Study. I took the asparagus fern, once we realized it is somehow alive, still. I couldn’t leave any more living things to die in that house.

‘Touch nothing
Move nothing
Stand still’

The aunt who part _{<mostly, repeatedly>} raised me was scrounging around in Mop Aunt’s car at one point, muttering about finding some damn food in here and I said I might have some dog treats in my glove box, because I thought she was muttering at the dog and was delighted to instead be able to offer her some of the food I’d brought, just in case I got hungry before the day got sorted out. I really miss feeding people, and this was neither a real meal, nor my best cooking, but to be able to hand someone some hearty food when they’re hungry was really nice here in the depths of this plague year.

‘See how the people here live now
Hope that they’re better at it than I was
I used to live 
Here’

I don’t understand how the smell could have been worse today, but it markedly was. Maybe Mop Aunt disturbed some long-abandoned food remains in her frenzy. Maybe it’s just one of those cursed places now that always provides a fresh horrible surprise. There is a jar of preserves on a bookcase in the upstairs hallway. In front of the books, just on the shelf. A seedling heat mat stood up against a living room wall, half behind a chair. A pantry cupboard, when opened, smelt so bad I retched even with the mask and the destruction inside strongly indicated rodents_{<and mice don’t smell like that>}. Mister wore gloves and full respirator and when Dad came outside at one point, he asked me if I knew who the person in the gas mask was? And I asked if he’d asked who he is and Dad said
.                                                                               ;I did, and he said ‘oh, I’m just a scavenger’;
.                                                                                                                                                                 and the image of my 6’3″ spouse in a full respirator and work gloves and a ‘Sodom Today, Gomorrah the World’ tshirt, telling my very uncomfortable father this in an already unhinged situation made me laugh so hard I had trouble coherently explaining to Dad that it was just Mister. The aunt who does not like me did not speak to me at all. She mopped and fussed with her dog and talked to my other aunt. She is the aunt who faked sick four years ago to follow Bea’s demands and not go to my wedding. Her daughter in law exposed the lie literally on the spot, and I have always been extra partial to her for that.

‘Living room to bedroom to kitchen
Familiar and warm
Hours we spent
Starving within these walls
Sounds of a distant storm’

There is wrapping paper in every facet of the hoard. New packages, all of them. Three or four multipacks of fresh wrapping paper in almost every room. A trunk of art supplies_{<mostly inks, a couple watercolor pigments and erasers>} wedged below two full totes of fake flowers_{<roses, mostly>}, still wrapped in cellophane. The upstairs bathroom door is junked off and I am too faint of heart to have opened it even for a second.

‘Fight through the ghosts in the hallway
Duck and weave
Stand by the door with my eyes closed
When it’s time
To leave’

I can’t imagine how long my reactive cleaning jag is going to last this time. It makes me miserable knowing that she would be pleased at knowing her hoard is being picked through; vindicated that others see value. Even her memory is_{<manipulative and>} exhausting and disgusting. She was mean, I did find out, right up until the very end. She called every healthcare worker a bitch and at one point had to be straight out told that if she didn’t stop acting like a complete fucking asshole, lying and refusing care, they were going to send her to hospice to die because they didn’t have another legal choice. I wish I could have seen her backed into that corner, to be honest. That angry, cruel part is so satisfied to know that someone got her absolutely and completely by the balls just fucking once in her vile life. And so she told the doctors she didn’t drink, even as they stood in front of her with her liver failure information charted out in their hands. The absolute fucking power of her denial is without measure.

‘Drive home with old dreams that play in my mind
And the wind at my back’

I’ll be decompressing for days. Maybe we can talk later about the denial pageant they’re planning for her ‘celebration of life’ in two weeks.

‘Like teeth in the mouth of a shark
I used to live
Here
I used to live
Here
I used to live
Here
I used to live
Here’
– Mountain Goats