Aunt Tweet lived in her house until it squeezed her out.
Mangled piles of fraying wires, moth-eaten fabric, disintegrating plastic crushed against the windows and crumbling on top of each other. The power shut off, the pipes frozen and bursting, the roof leaking, a tidal wave of cold, gray water washing her out the front door into the street.
“They come from over the water,” Mrs. Shortley said with a wave of her arm. “The’re what is called Displaced Persons.”
“Displaced persons,” he said. “Well, now, I declare! What do that mean?”
“It means they ain’t where they were born at and there’s nowhere for them to go- like if you was run out of here and wouldn’t nobody have you.”
“It seem like they here, though,” the old man said in a reflective voice. “If they here, they somewhere.” 1
Across the room, Aunt Tweet snorts abruptly. Her head is sunken back against the couch cushions and her mouth is open, a thin white line drawn between her lips. She takes in her breath with a gurgling, rattling gasp. I close my book and slink upstairs. The door to Rachel’s room is closed, and I hear several unfamiliar voices: I forgot she was calling her friends tonight. The door to my room is open, and plastic bags full of Aunt Tweet’s belongings are scattered across the floor. I’ve emptied the drawers of my dresser for her, but she insists on maintaining a suspended state between her presence here and her imagined return to her own house. As a result, she takes up even more space than she would otherwise.
Back on the couch where I started, I jam in my earbuds, turn up the most soothing classical music I can find as loud as it will go, and try to pretend the loud rattling noise in the background is some kind of exotic instrument. My spine is jammed against the back of the couch and my knees stick out over the edge of the cushions. My neck is bent at an awkward angle, so I slide my head downward and rest it on my hand, which then prickles with pins and needles. My hips sag out of line with the rest of my body and start to feel sore. I don’t think it’s possible to fall asleep here until Rachel shakes me awake. “Why didn’t you tell me you wanted to go to sleep?” she demands. When I last entered her room this afternoon she spent half an hour complaining to me about how hard it was to focus on her schoolwork; I nodded understandingly and made patient, affirmative noises until she shouted at me to get out because I was distracting her. Since she seems to have forgiven that offense, I make a noise that is not patient, affirmative or otherwise intelligible and straggle up the stairs.
In the morning I find Aunt Tweet at the kitchen counter, making a bowl of cereal. She shuffles sideways as I pass, as if she were afraid I might trip over her. She has pulled the bag of cereal out of the box- she says it’s easier to pour that way- and the cereal has settled in a wide mound at the bottom of the bag that bulges and crunches as she stuffs it back through the narrow opening.
I notice that her bowl is only half full. “That’s not very much,” I say.
“I’ve found it expands when you add the milk,” she explains.
I open my mouth, close it, and disappear into the basement.
I flip the light switch and a single, dim bulb flickers on, the light diffused by a dusty tin pie plate. Stacks of boxes press into the puffy pink fiberglass exposed overhead. One box, tall and narrow, overflows with camp mats and sleeping bags. One of my childhood friends crawled in there when we were playing hide and seek, and no one could find him. I grab the sketchbook that I’ve left on the bottom stair and pick my way down the narrow aisle. I find a leather bound trunk that looks relatively sturdy, shove aside a stack of yellowed papers and sit down. I lean back against a bookshelf, which begins to teeter, shift forward again, hunching over my sketchbook, and flip to a blank page.
Upstairs, I hear the shuffle-clunk of plastic soles on the linoleum, the soft release of the seal on the refrigerator door, then plastic rubbing on plastic. A painfully long pause. More shuffling.
The milk pours over the sides of the bowl, pools on the counter, drips into the linoleum and spreads into a sticky, translucent sheet. Soggy, lukewarm oatmeal squares float into the hallway, settle in warm, squishy mounds on the basement steps as sour milk dribbles over the bare wood, seeps into cardboard boxes below , into the crevasses of ancient tools, broken pieces of furniture, tarnished model trains and brittle plastic toys, dries in a crusty white film. The odor fuses itself with the faltering breath of the furnace and the fluttering heartbeat of the water heater, until it is one with the basement’s soul.
As the shuffle-clunk travels in the direction of the kitchen table, the ceiling vibrates and the milk showers down on my head like rainwater shaken out of the trees. It splatters the pages of my sketchbook, carries the soft graphite into smudgy gray puddles before settling into the fibers of the paper. I draw the shapes of copper pipes, twisting around and melting into the puddles of milk. They shudder and writhe, agonized and confused.
1 Flannery O’Connor, “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” in Three By Flannery O’Connor (New York: The New American Library), 266.