THBH, a short story

Town

The town is strikingly normal, but at the same time, raw. Its rows of streets, each endearingly messy with scads of crooked pastel houses, meander across pretty, sun-soaked hills. From above, the rooftops are spray-painted with images of flowers and swirls, balloons and birds.

The inhabitants are cheery enough, nice enough, hospitable enough. Enough. If you were to stroll through the town at high noon, each and every building, every house and shack and store would be in near-perfect condition. Not perfect, nobody’s perfect, they say. Nothing’s perfect.

But if you were to limp through it in the middle of the night, something would be off. The infusion of moonlight into the windows of every building turns an invisible dial in the night, like the rolling of knuckles under skin, and the town becomes… perfect. Nothing changes about it physically, but you can sense that its aura changes, its overall essence. In the passage between night and midnight, the colors rush out of the town. The close-to-perfect gets the hell out of Dodge, and the real perfection sets in.

But it’s not what you might classify as “perfect,” the essence. It’s too quiet, even a little bit creepy if you’re sensitive. Nothing moves. There are no colors but the white-on-black of the moon on the houses and the trees.

It stays there, still, until dawn seeps over the horizon. The town imperceptibly warms, subtly shades, until the first person wakes and the fog is pierced. Then the day is ready. Then it starts again.

House

It’s a little run-down, the house, but they’ll take what they can get. The family moves in on Sunday. Their boxes are packed in the white van, their tears are scattered on the kitchen floor. They don’t want to leave, but they have to.

The house has a vaguely spiral-shaped scratch on the front door and an ambiguous stain on the living-room carpet, but its overall attitude is decidedly welcoming. Other than the smoothness of dark sepia that covers it every night, as it goes in the town, it seems like it could be home to an array of people. Behind that, though, the house has a blemish. A hidden imperfection. An… underneath.

The house isn’t okay with this. The house wants to be perfect. The house wants to be responsible for its own reputation, rather than entrusting itself to anyone with rent money. The house wants to be loved.

That’s rather unlikely to happen soon, though, as it is being used now as a go-between, a temporary fix-up. The house can’t tell why. Some catastrophe that can only be fixed by packing up and leaving home. There are plenty.

So the family will move in and the house will be silent, and the family will quake and the house will be scared of the underneath. The family will huddle in the bed.

The house will cry. Nobody gets out. The police will come. The house will cry.

Boy

He’s short for eleven, but athletic nonetheless. His family is well-off enough to afford him plenty of clothes, but the boy always seems to frequent the same pair of sweatpants and his soccer team’s t-shirt. His eyes are blue. Not forget-me-not blue, not robin’s egg blue, just blue.

He’s so close to figuring out the world. In the moment between twisting and twisted, he will see what he really needs to know, and throw out what he doesn’t. That’s not what he’s worried about now, though. He’s busy distorting his life in the way only panicked eleven-year olds can.

He’s heard yelling from the other room. Not that that’s unusual, yelling is forever and always around the boy. No, the unusual part is that the yelling came from someone he didn’t recognize. He lives with his brother, mother and father in a brand-new house that they had to rent out after the “incident.” He’s still not entirely sure what the “incident” was, but he didn’t ask because nobody seemed to keen on telling him. He almost mentioned it once, but as soon as he opened his mouth his mother shot him a glare so cold it froze his face right then and there.

           So the yelling is coming from someone he can’t make out. It’s nobody he knows. Too shrill to be his father’s or mother’s, but with a tinge of sadness that makes his teeth clench. He’s sure it’s a monster, or at the very least a serial killer.

           But as soon as he slows his thoughts down enough to go explore the issue, the screaming stops. He gingerly steps over to his parents’ room, and there they are, standing with his brother. There’s a broken phone on the bed. They are hugging tightly, and pull him into the pack. He starts to ask what happened, but his mother’s words cut him off:

           “We’re going to have to move again.”

Heart

Sometimes, the heart feels as if it’s barely needed. It mostly squirms. Hearts don’t beat. If you were to cut off all the layers of a human and hold them up to the sunlight, they would glimmer (humans are electric), and when you got to the heart, you would be surprised. It’s ugly, not the object of amore that songs sing of and poets write of. It’s lumpy, and a strange brown-red color instead of the Technicolor bloodiness you would expect. The appearance is the expected one of an appendix, of cancer; nothing as glamorous as the heart has ever had its ugliness shielded for so long. It doesn’t beat. It squirms, squiggles, moves in time to a song dictated by nothing in particular.

Sometimes, though, the heart feels like it shouldn’t be working as hard as it does. The heart can’t tell what happens outside of the ribcage, all it knows is that periodically it will have to dance so hard that it almost cracks its surroundings. On some days, when it goes to sleep, it dreads the morning because it knows it will have to work hard again, all day.

But one day, the heart notices something different. It’s not a change in atmosphere, or different surroundings, but there is something excess in the blood that makes it pause. It can’t place it at first, but eventually it figures it out: adrenaline. The chemical is slowly eroding the heart’s well-being. It is from this that the heart knows something is wrong, but as soon as the flow of adrenaline stops the heart forgets. Hearts aren’t ones for memories.

The heart doesn’t know of music, or art, or love. It doesn’t know it’s keeping someone alive. It doesn’t know that it’s put on a pedestal by history as the center of all emotion. The heart isn’t the one that does the feeling; of course, the heart doesn’t know that either. The heart just is. It only works as well as it does because it’s completely ignorant of its duty. This is the life it knows. The heart will thrash and dance. One day, it will stop.