Dancing On Kitchen Floors and Broken Mirrors

Dancing On Kitchen Floors and Broken Mirrors

John D. Gorman

There is a house made of cobwebs with a foundation of mist. Three people with beating hearts live inside a house made for ghosts, yet all they are is cold. A boy sits at a desk behind a closed door on the top floor. He’s covered his window with sheets and broken the lights so all he can see is a visible darkness. He tells his waking hours from sleep by the faces on the walls; they are his Friends, and they come out when he dreams. So he spends his days in darkness, hoping one day he doesn’t wake up. Though, secretly, unbeknownst to even him, he dreams of a day when he wakes up and has the strength to turn on a light.

A father and a mother sit at a kitchen table covered in dust. Wilted herb boxes line their windowsills. Dried husks of flowers crumble until the pile of petals resemble sloughs of dead skin. The mother is waiting for her son, and the father is waiting for the words, the ones that will be able to tell her that their son isn’t going to come down until they replace the lights. Yet there is no electricity in a house made for ghosts, so there are no words for him to say to her.

Is it strange for a house made for ghosts to lack lights? Maybe not, if ghosts are the glowing apparitions that float through walls and can read our deepest thoughts without knowing who we are, what we like to eat, or whether we’re capable of having hard, intelligent conversations. If they do indeed glow, then they are their own source of light. If something is dead and possesses light, then being alive means possessing darkness. This makes living inside a house made for ghosts difficult, if not impossible, but somehow the father remembers how they’ve made it work. He brushes the dust from his shoulders and offers his hand to the mother, who takes it, hesitating to pull her thoughts away from their son. Still, they stand and he pushes his toes underneath her feet until she is standing on the tops of his. He takes her by the waist, and she by his shoulders, and they waltz to an invisible organ in their kitchen.

The boy hears the organ, though he knows not whether he is awake or dreaming, for the faces blink at him from the dark, but he can feel a warm heartbeat echoing in his ears. The faces contort into wrinkles of frustration. The older faces spit glass at the boy’s feet and he dances to the same waltz, cutting open his toes and fleshy soles. The younger faces jeer at him when he cannot find the door. The organ swells as the words come to the father’s mind, but before he can utter them, the boy pulls down his sheets and lets a cold winter sun flood the room. There are no faces. There are no shards of glass; his feet are numb with chill but whole and unbloodied. The father and the mother dance undisturbed, yet the words have vanished from the father’s head.

They might have never existed at all for what he could remember.

Windy - Molly Carroll