I need to go back into that house. Set fire to those spacious rooms that are brightly lit and preserved in my memory. What did its facade look like? I can only remember the inside of the house instead of the outside. The address is unknown to me. The carpet and the wooden floors felt like a thicket of thorns catching the fall of a recalcitrant child in a Brothers Grimm fairytale. I need to pick the lock, paint white walls red, make them kneel taped and tied, hold them responsible. My childhood face screams and refracts off a piece of broken glass. I could hunt those horned, flare-eyed monsters for miles through opal, muddy woodland. I need infantile, tempestuous tirades, triggers of revenge pulled in that house. I need a mask over my face in that house. I need pleading, scabbed knees, their last call to god. In the glass house demolished by stones. The unseen, inaccessible forest where it all went dark. The circle of hell, its minimalist decor, the fire in my skull as it hit the inferno floor. Burn down, salt the grounds of the house. It took the illusions of marigolds and left me staring bleakly at haunted doorways, anhedonia sewed into my bones.
- “Floors” by Darla Cathilde Cutherford
