Work Text:
Once upon a time there was a girl and a house and a love and a hill. No that is too many things. Once upon a time there was a house and a love. Only a house cannot love because a house doesn’t know what love is. It can be built with love, though this one was not. It can be loved by it’s occupants, though this one was not. So maybe it is really, once upon a time there was a girl and a house and the house thought it could love.
Yes that sounds more correct.
But the house’s love was one of a collector and a butterfly. The careful and loving cold touch of pliers and pins to best display the wings. The hallowing of the inside to best make it a religious experience.
The house is not hallowed ground. It’s touch is not healing. It keeps me stuck with splinters under my fingernails from trying to get out of its walls. Yet it tells me that soon I will be empty and it will puff back up my insides carefully for best preservation.
It asks me to slowly starve so that it may preserve my corpse.
But I refuse to just lay down and die to something like this house. I will eat and eat and eat. I will crave more then the darkness. I will eat more then the light can provide. I will eat this house out of a home.
I will not give myself to keep this house warm. I will not light my hair on fire to give it a hearth. I will instead light it’s splinters on fire and try to convince the fire to lick up the walls, to curl the wall paper and as the windows stay firmly closed the smoke will fill up my stomach. I will consume the smoke until I can eat no more.
And then I will eat the coals left behind to stay warm.
And then the house will slowly repair my lungs, my stomach, my wallpaper, it will clean my glassy eyes of all the smog because it cannot pin something so gruesome. Roadkill is not a pretty thing to collect. It wants a butterfly not broken raccoon that’s skull is split and teeth scattered. Something that has flattened into a weird hard puck of viscera. No that is not something that can be prettily pinned.
So it will reconstruct my being. And ask me again to starve. Ask me again to allow it to hollow me out and make me hallow for it. Ask if I burn that I burn my own hair and enter it’s fireplace to warm it safely.
Because that is what is expected of the woman of the house. But I am not the woman of the house.
I am the girl.
I don’t want to grow into the woman of this house. I don’t want to be so bound and pinned in place to this building that I forget that I even lived.
Anna you took care of my grandmother you know how she was weak. How this house just took what it wanted from her. How she let the house kill her and in turn she killed it as well. She took it and had it rot with her. She took this house and told it that it could be love. That it could be a home. Then she left it to you as an inheritance. But they forgot about me still stuck in the walls trying to be loved by something that doesn’t know what the word means.
Sally was a woman of the house. Husband and wife. Mother and child. Grandmother and grandchild. A woman who didn’t let silly things like love get in the way of her perfect scrapbook life. Who didn’t let silly important choices change her safe well traveled route. She would burn her own love to keep a hearth then burn the house that she called a home. Even if the word was a lie.
She would come out of her house when the moon was gone as to not be reminded of other paths. She would say it was just because rising with the sun made a productive person. But she was not productive. She didn’t do a single thing in her life that made anyone else live better.
Anna you do not want to become the woman of the house. The house is warped around you but it isn’t warped like it is for me.
Because I don’t fully remember always that I have skin and not wallpaper when I am within it’s walls. That my eyes are not clear glass looking both ways. That my maw is not just a front door. That I can run in a way the house cannot.
So I burn my hair and make it’s walls catch on fire.
And then it tells me a story that I do not believe as it puts me back together. As it reminds me that it loves me. It speaks of love as if it is a simple choice. As if one just chooses what to love and that it is as easy as turning on a light.
And so I eat the lead paint next.
And it coos because a poisoned body can be pinned. Then I light my entire body on fire and eat the flames and smoke. The house screams as my skull cracks again in the heat. As I ruin it’s pinnings.
And I laugh and laugh as the house chides me for my little rages. Tells me that I should be a woman now not a girl. I cannot be raging like a child anymore.
But Anna here’s the thing. The house doesn’t understand the difference between a girl and a woman. It doesn’t understand time any better then it understands love. So it makes it’s world a fairytale and then becomes confused. A story role must be filled and I am filling the role of the girl. I cannot move out of my role. I am already pinned in place. I refuse to be pinned in another.