There Is a Dead Man in My Attic
By Mateus Dix
I huddle against the wind rattling my walls. My door hangs open, an invalid’s mouth coursed with drool. The wind sprays leaves across my threshold. The leaves are still wet, other than the few blown past the couch to mix with the ashes of the fire. The fireplace at my center sits cold, ashes spilling from its iron teeth.
Perhaps the wet leaves explain why I do not hear the girl enter.
She slides through the shadows and up to the ashes before I feel her feet. They are light and cold and naked on our floorboards. She is crouching in a flannel shirt that dwarfs her. We touch it with one of our splintered planks, but she pulls it away from us and closer around her, leaving us with an inch of thread. It was his shirt once, but now the thread tastes of smoke and blood.
She is not a child, but the way her eyes dart and her neck cranes and her eyes are wide and hollow like a rabbit sniffing at the edge of the compost heap make her seem young, child-like, vulnerable.
I have seen the shirt before—the shirt of the man who built me, from this fireplace up to the attic where he lies rotting on the trapdoor he could not open from within. I remember his screams shuddering through my rafters.
She draws in a long breath and bursts into a fit of coughing. I know the rot she smells, though I can only feel it. The rot of the leaves, of the spider-web growth on the coffee in the tin mug on the rough-hewn end table, of the something brewing behind the ice box latch, of the unidentifiable pulsing over the edge of the skillet above the empty propane—of the body upstairs, the body of the man who fit me together. The body of the man who made me out of the logs he hewed and milled himself, who built a fire in me every morning before dawn and boiled his coffee on the embers, who brought wild game in every evening to roast over my hearth.
She leans toward that hearth, staring into the shadows that hollow her cheeks. The wood is a ruin—half-used logs tossed with brush tossed with scraps of cloth and canvas and a rusting metal zipper. A two inch plastic wheel is half-melted into the back corner, all that is left of her suitcase.
He burnt her phone first—how brightly it sparked—then her shoes, then her clothes, and her suitcase last. I sensed the progression over the two months. I felt his pacing agitation and her huddling. The feeling of two in the house was strange, but the light of the burning brought new life to me. I straightened as the shadows receded in the weird light and its roiling smoke staining my chimney.
It was during the last burning that he unlocked the attic. “Need ammunition,” he muttered, and he took the key with him. A padlock is a funny thing. It takes a key to open but very little to close. Even a huddling girl with no clothes on can loop a chain and shut a padlock, and a paranoid man makes a thick trapdoor.
I shudder with the memory of the slamming that shook my spine. I felt her nails rake the floor in the kaleidoscope light of the fire licking up the skeleton of her suitcase. She came up with his over-large shirt. A bullet cracked through me and lodged in my floorboards near her shaking hands, and she fled out the door, and in my shuddering pain I did not feel the door slam and swing back open.
The echoing reverberations of a riflebutt slamming repeatedly against the reinforced timbers. The noise and pain of bullets ricocheting off my planks. The weakening. The shrieks and pleas and sobs. Then the quiet interspersed with miserable groans. Then the final shot and its silence. His struggle made me restless, woke me from my warm sleep. Bullets in my bones, the man who built me dying in my attic.
Now I am cold, shuddering in winter’s first wind, and I am more awake than ever before.
The girl is making a fire. The shivering of her hands shakes through her hunched frame and into my floorboards. A spark lights some cloth which sets the dry sticks crackling. Then a log blinks into flame, and she shudders into the warmth and the reek of burning plastic. I feel the heat. The spurts of light give me clarity, embers of fury in my bereavement.
The man that made me dead in my attic. The girl who killed him starting a fire in my hearth.
A spasm runs through my timbers, and I slam the front door shut.
THE END
Author Bio: Mateus Dix travels, writes, teaches, and plays with his nearly two-year old, Eleanor, who just said her first sentence: “This is a sock.” Mateus has been writing since he was 8 and has an essay on home, "Here," published in The Curator Magazine. He is working on editing his novel, “Faceless,” and publishing some short stories as precursors to his novel.