This week I thought I would write something a little different, namely sharing a short story that I've written recently and like quite a lot. We need to provide space for the creative pieces as well as the fun lists and news pieces and I have decided that a lot of my articles will start incorporating these more narrative pieces.

This first short story is called A New Home, inspired by the graphic novel "Fun Home" by Alison Bechdel:

The wallpaper fell in sheets onto the already dust covered carpet, its flowers faded pink and brown with age. The wall behind was no cleaner; once green paint chips and crumbling drywall flew into the stale air. The carpet below was grimy and dusty, the fallen walls covering the faded brown fibers, but he still held onto the hope that there were hardwood floors beneath it.

My father had been similarly hopeful about the wall, wondering if the wallpaper was harboring some hidden gem beneath. He was instead greeted by more falling paint and the smell of must insulation. The soft white mask on his mouth and nose did little to prevent the onslaught of coughing that would befall him. Sweat dripped from his brow as he continued the arduous task.

This house was his project, something new to occupy his mind, another child for him to care for and nurture before setting it free (though my father’s particular form of nurturing was better suited for sanding floors and hanging paintings than caring for children). The groundwork was already laid out before him: a perfectly blank canvas ready for the right artist to grab hold of.

The plan was to work inside out: start with the rooms, the kitchen, the dining room, and work his way outside to the garden. However, the urge to mold the landscape and create the picturesque Grecian garden would grab hold of him and he would find himself digging and planting, adding the foundations for pathways and fountains; wanting to create the perfect illusion of what the inside was to come.

This house was a new home, but it wasn’t his home. His home, the home I had grew up in, was finished in his eyes, much to the joy of my mother. It was in this new home that he would find distraction from his urges; it was in this new home that he hoped to bury the past; it was in this new home that he wondered if he ever could.

The house was nowhere near finished when it happened. Rooms left half torn apart, a garden that was only partially planted, holes left in the ground where weeds had been pulled and rose bushes were to be placed; trees and shrubs sat in their plastic pots waiting to be returned to the earth. The grass began to grow tall, taller than my father would have ever allowed. Weeds sprung up again in the yard, their yellow flowers and jagged leaves destroying the progress he had made.

Eventually my mother sold the house to the next person who wanted to create something from this foundation. A part of me wanted it for myself, to keep as a memory of what he wanted, to leave it as a time capsule of what could have been; another part of me knew that he would have wanted it to have been finished. The house was too good to let sit forever.

Maybe if he had stuck to his plan, started on the inside, created a beautiful home before creating the perfect garden, maybe then he wouldn’t have been hit. But there is an unspoken truth there that seems more important than what could have been: he wasn’t happy. He tried to find happiness in this project but everything was piling up around him; the truth was starting to come out more and more and I felt like I was losing the father I once knew.

Even now I can’t help but feel bad about what had happened. A part of me feels like it was my fault; if I hadn’t come out, then maybe he would still be living his mundane, secretive life. There are still questions that will never have answers and only half of me wants to leave them alone, while the other half wants to scream and run and curse who ever thought this would be okay to live with.

Like the house, my father’s life was full of potential. The foundation was set, but the mold had set in, and nothing could have ever fixed it.