foreclosure season
by Christian Fuller
When Paul set his shoes on fire, we told him to piss it out. That, like, he’d better hurry. He was only supposed to light up the insulation we’d pulled out from the eggshell walls , there on the great room floor, but we were sixteen and drunk enough to fist fight god and things just had a way of happening. Now, he was laid out in the foyer, his sprinkler system free flowing, his feet bicycle kicking above him like two disaster movie meteorites.
Marco watched the flames flicker against the windows of the house he was raised in. The house his family was gonna lose. He’d cut his face shaving, and the blood was trickling again now, down into his smile, his teeth bared like a cornered animal.
It was dead of summer, and Marco’s house was full of kids we tangentially knew. Friends of friends. Kids from different schools. We gave them hammers. We said have at it. The evening started with a linebacker from Perryville Prep plowing through the pantry door in his best strip-sack. The same pantry I picked through when Marco’s parents had me over after school, when my parents didn’t bother to stock ours. Growing boys’ll make their way. Rice cakes fire-crackered under our feet as the house shed its skin.
The insulation wasn’t supposed to light up, so it burned bad, and the air filled with a smell like smoldering box-dyed hair. The house wasn’t supposed to burn along with it. But maybe it was better that it did.
We could feel the neighbors' eyes as they poltergeisted behind their West Elm window shades. The kinda eyes that belonged to storybook beasts you’re supposed to kill with silver shivs. But all we had were our teenage middle fingers and slurs lodged in our throats beside the blunt coughs.
No one thought Marco was serious when he said his parents were gonna lose the house. We kept saying cut the shit, man. We kept saying sure, and you’ve got a girlfriend up in Canada, too,’ and she’s got the fattest tits this side of the solar system. We kept not saying sorry. Until we found him in the bathroom, puffy-faced and trying to do rebreathing exercises into a plastic 7/11 bag. Then, all we could say was sorry. It dribbled from our lips, a mumblecore script with a single word written on the page.
We called it a ‘foreclosure party,’ and along with the hammers, we bought enough liquor to get god so wasted you could actually beat him in a fist fight. We told everyone, get fucked up and get to work. Would the bank wanna repossess a husk? A thing buried? We said put it to the test. Paint can threshings made Pride zebras of the walls. We smoked inside, cheap menthols with that good fiber glass and shoddy joints Paul rolled with too much spit , ashing onto the hardwood.
I used a sledge to take out the support beams from the back deck. With each strike, I recalled the weight of the keg stirrer we used when Marco’s dad let us help him with that dogshit homebrew beer of his. Spring grasses got snuffed out by the stench of bad, boiled bread. Sweating through the fumes in our basketball jerseys, barley blotched onto the composite deck boards. When the deck came down, they crackled like ACLs, like legs gone backwards. I stared at the heap, wondering why my dad never made bad beer, never clasped my shoulder, never smiled at me.
His parents took off when the season started. Marco said they were on a money trip, that they were gonna get enough to keep it, come hell or high water or jail time. We spent morbid hours playing 20 questions with the universe, trying to parse out where the fuck they could’ve gone and what the fuck they could be doing. Gambling, I guessed, hitting every casino between the coast and Carson City. Paul supposed they were robbing banks. He kept giggling about it. Paul never stopped giggling, because he was a stoner and had difficulty confronting concepts like loss. Which, like, fair. Mikey S had psycho eyes and floated around on some internet territories of questionable legality. He said murder-for-hire is a better racket now than it’s ever been, if you have the right grindset. He’d seen a menu on some back pages once.
“It’s a volume game these days,” he told us. “You wouldn’t believe how cheap killing can come.”
Briefly, we entertained the idea of pooling our allowances and taking out hits on all the bank folks who sat in their fancy offices, licking their lips as the debt warehouse-palleted up on Marco’s family. But then his eyes got morning-dewy like he was gonna start crying again so went back to the script, saying sorry and sorry and I’m sorry, man.
We frisbee-golfed the Corelles. After his fifth joint, Paul wasn’t very good at catching them. Marco said he always wanted to know what the flowers they stamped on them were, the flowers now fragmented on the foyer floor. Were they wildflowers or daffodils or China roses? He kicked pieces of the fancy ceramics together in an unceremonious jigsaw. Marco was just that way. Liking plants and animals and reading shit. Softer than the rest of us. Kinder than the rest of us. A kid who played sports only to have something to do, to not be left out of the conversation. He was smarter than the rest of us, too. Smart enough to be honest that he was scared, and the way he said it, all vulnerable and what have you, made my palms sweat, gave me this big, hollow feeling at the center of my chest. Is that what we’re supposed to be like? My folks would just point at the school trophy case and say that, be that and so I was that on my good days and thought about killing myself on the others, but it was all kosher, wasn’t it? We had our house. And that’s everything.
All summer, our focus had become distraction, abstraction, killing time like an invasive species. Keep Marco occupied. Fuck it, we weren’t going out quiet. We put lawn chairs on the slant of the shingled roof over the porch. Mikey S had a fake ID and dead psycho eyes that no clerk would question. We made a fort from the cardboard of empty 30 racks. The stacks took on storybook castle shapes, turrets and towers where we scouted for the monster neighbors and their sharp-tooth judgements. Days sloshed into each other, a slurry of cheap liquor and strong weed and the occasional acid tab. Who gave a shit about girls and about virginities, about making varsity, about anything that wasn’t this? People died overseas in wars. The rest of our parents curled their mouths at inflation drunk-driving at us 100 miles an hour on the wrong side of the road. But we only wanted to keep Marco sane, keep Marco here with us.
And then August came. His parents hadn’t come back from their money trip. For all we knew, they were different people now in a different country, and to them Marco was some dead memory in a dead house that belonged to dead people they’d taken a hit out on.
A chick from the private, catholic school with hubcap braces and D cups managed to crowbar the basement bathroom waterline out from the wall. Wet t-shirted all over her and her gaggle of Svedka-guzzling besties. Glugging into the carpet, seeping into the foundation. Floodwaters rising. I sat with Marco and Paul and Mikey S on the blue sectional as it became an island. The world spinning, drunk off its axis.
This basement had raised us, the place to go when our parents decided to give us opportunity but not the time. Have everything and you’ll want for nothing, you know? Except for that one crucial fucking piece you don’t have.
“Think we’ll stay friends?” Marco asked. We baboon-nodded, we beat our chests, we tried to figure out what aghast looks like on a teenage face. But really, I was just begging my mouth didn’t give away the lodestone in my gut heavy as a cave-in.
It was easy to see a house get dismantled. Drywall sledged to pixie dust. Hardwood tooth-pulled from the foundation. Marco floated through the rooms, a ghost being haunted by the house instead of vice versa, but he kept saying it’s okay. It's okay. This is all good.
The pretty windows went out with breaking-and-entering soundscapes. Marco cradled a piece of glass in his palm, squeezed it till the blood ran red as his razor burn.
How easy is it to see a home get dismantled? Paul kicked his burning shoes in the hallway. Marco stood in the street, looking back at his house, and beneath the streetlamp light, he already looked like a double exposure, the mistake of a moment caught in memory. Sorry, I said. I’m sorry man.
Photo of Christian Fuller
BIO: Christian Fuller is a writer from Baltimore. His fiction has been featured or is forthcoming in HAD, BRUISER, Variant Lit, BULL, Weird Fiction Magazine, and elsewhere. Please send all inquiries to him in the form of Midwest emo song titles to @cfullerwrites on Twitter.