Kilimanjaro

Kilimanjaro
Chris Woods

Lying under crumpled sheets, the old man puts down his history book. Plastic tubes are inserted into his nostrils to help him breath, and with each breath in comes a quick shoot of air, hissing shortly. On his dresser is two purple hearts he received in the Second World War and small lead sculptures of soldiers of most wars from 1800 on, and every soldier of World War II from every country, except the French. The old man couldn’t find those toy soldiers anywhere. He breathes again sharply as he son sits down in the chair next to the bed.
“How you doing pop?” his son asked, and the old man looked at the wall. “Fine, fine I suppose. A little bored. I just wish I would die already.” His son winced, “don’t say that pop, please don’t say that.” The old man patted his son’s hand. “Sorry, David.” There was a long pause, son staring at the wall, father staring at the ceiling.
“Do you know a story that goes like this, David?” his father started. “An old warrior lay on his death bed, waiting for his last breath. He had seen many days and many battles, and lived through them all, only to be killed by time itself. After days and days of waiting, he whispered to his wife, ‘please, have mercy. Kill me.’ The wife took her husband’s knife, and held it to his throat, but hesitated. ‘Do it!’ he cried, tears running down both of their cheeks. But the wife couldn’t draw a drop of blood.” David could feel tears building up behind his eyelid, but he held them back, squinting his eyes tightly.
“Finally, after weeks of waiting, the man saw a dark winged creature in his window. ‘You’re here at last,’ he said, gathering the strength to sit up. The winged creature took him by the shoulders, and they flew out of the window. They flew and flew over the trees and through the clouds, up to a mountain white with snow. ‘Kilimanjaro,’ the old warrior said, and the winged creature let out a screech. ‘So this is where I die,’ and the old warrior let go.” The only sound that could be heard was the quick hissing of the oxygen tank.
~~~
David put his keys on the table, announcing, “Diane, I’m home.” His wife leaned back, peeking her head through the door, and smiled. “I just put the kettle on,” she said as she nodded her head for him to come over. The embraced, he lightly gave her a peck on the cheek, and looked at each other for a while, Diane’s smile fading to frown. “What’s wrong?”
“It was something dad said when I saw him at lunch break. He said he wanted to die, just get it over with already.” David turned away from his wife and looked down. Diane put her arms around him, her head on his shoulder. She could feel his slight tremble. “The thing is, though, is I kind of agreed with him.”
“What?” Diane jumped back and took her arms from David. “How could you say something like that?”
“I don’t know.” He put his hand to his brow, covering his eyes. “I just don’t know how much more of this I can take.”
They stood, avoiding each other’s eyes until the teapot began to whistle.
~~~
“It’s good you got this done,” Diane said. “It’s like a cleansing. I always feel great when I clean up.
“But I wasn’t cleaning up, I was packing up my dad’s old house.” David was growing more and more irritable as Diane unfolded a shirt from, looked at it, and folded it back again, placing it beside the box she got it from. Moving his father’s things out of his old apartment was the last thing David wanted to do, but with the landlord’s patience running thin, she threatened to move the old man’s stuff to the dumpster. After all, it had been two months without an occupant, and without rent. David let out an overdramatic sigh that tells his wife that this is the end of the conversation. He stared down at the table.
“Okay, fine” she said, giving up. She lifted an off-white bed sheet out of the box and fluffed it out.
“Hey, did your dad have a bird or something?”
“What? I think you’d know if he had a bird,” David looked up at his wife, and in her hand, he saw a large black feather. “Where did you get that?”
“It was here in this bed sheet. The feather fell out when I shook it.” David took the black feather between his thumb and forefinger, holding it close to his eyes. The words “Kilimanjaro” escaping his smiling lips.

March of the Dust Bunnies

March of the Dust Bunnies
Anthony Valdez

The striking shafts of morning sunlight slice through the trees and blossom on the ancient house’s hardwood floors. Spinning in the light of a newly awakened sun and echoing the shuddering breath of an old house coming back to life for a new day, the tiny dust motes shine. The dust motes rise lazily from every sunlit surface and with them rise the memories. The gamboling romps and gorgeous occasions seem to fill every space with chatter and laughter and purpose. The house creaks and moans with the longing to once more have those days, to be put to the use that its makers had intended it for. A mighty structure such as this is for lives to be lived and laughter, for hopes and dreams and heartaches.
And now, what is left?
Dust. Dust and the cry of a derelict house mourning the death of its purpose. Dust and memories. Memories thick as the film on the broken ceiling fans and empty window panes. Memories caked on the mantelpiece and floating along a fractured and forgotten hall. Each floating moment drawn into the atmosphere by the deep, slow breathing of the abode, like some primeval Hill Giant. Each inhalation is filled with a piece of the mystery. Each creaky word the house speaks is alive with the age-old spark, the memory of life.
When the bits and pieces of an old house begin to long for a purpose once more, one of two things will happen. Something will come along and fill the void, or the house itself will give in to its hopeless cause and surrender to destruction and decay. But when the living space becomes the living, how can it choose to go quietly into a weather-beaten death?
* * *
There is a tickling sensation that the house can feel in its timbers. Something is inside. It is walking softly and lightly through the basement, brushing up against the support beams, making its way to the stairs.
The house softly squeaks the stairs as its guest ascends them, trying to communicate a welcome, and then stops and falls silent. The house didn’t feel it’s basement window being tampered with. It doesn’t remember any feeling of entry, just that something is now inside. The house will occasionally let some of the animals from the wood and fields that surround it slip in through the chimney or shove their way into the spaces between the walls. Not many of the animals stay because without the mess that humans make, there is nothing for them to eat or destroy but the wood the house is built out of. If insects dare to eat at the house’s wood, it invites mice and birds to eat the bugs. The house even has a family of blue jays that stay underneath its roof’s overhang in the spring and a few mice and voles living near the front door year round. While the animals are wonderful as guests and pest control, rodents and birds don’t have the grandeur that the humans had. They could never throw parties or decorate with much more that their own nests and droppings. How then, if the mice are out in the fields gathering grain and the jays have already gone for the oncoming winter, did this somebody get inside unnoticed?
The house almost shivers when the stranger wraps a calloused hand around its brass basement doorknob. The door squeaks and rattles as the hand tries to turn the knob and shake the door open. Handling doors like that is much too rough for the house and it shakes dust and dead insect bodies from the rafters onto the somebody’s head.
“Hey! Quit doing that you. I ain’t going to hurt nothing.” Says a grainy, low voice. The house is taken aback. It has never been directly spoken to aside from when its previous inhabitants said that they would miss it upon their departure. The house felt something small being stuck between its door frame and wetness as its lock, knob and keyhole are sprayed with grease. It squeaks a stair, questioningly. An instrument is slid into the keyhole and gently moves up and down as one by one the tumblers click into place. The lock clanks open and the intruder slowly turns the knob and enters the kitchen.
“Oh, just wonderful. Marvelous, if I do say so. This shall be the workshop. And the morning light is absolutely perfect.” The stranger says.
A loud groan is issued from top floor and the house smacks a blue-paint-peeling shutter against a window.
“Yipe!” Says the stranger. “Now don’t you be getting all upset with me for nothing. I just came because you were wanting someone to live here and I needed to have some quiet. You wouldn’t believe the noise in those mines. Always something clanging, someone shouting. A gobbie can never get away from it. I am a mechanic and I’m not interested in creating a new rail system or self collapsing mine carts for those quota-crunching rock-heads trying to hide all the fairy ore before the humans can get to it. The whole idea is a load of rubbish. Those humans wiped out a good deal of one another when they decided gold was worth something besides just being another rock, so lets let them have all the rocks they want, maybe they’ll quit bothering us and get rid of more of one another.”
The house groaned high in its rafters at the last.
“Oh, I see,” the creature said, “you want them to come back. That is why I’m here, I suppose, because you wanted some company. Well, as a part of what those silly mutated apes commonly refer to as the fairy race, I am quite excited to be granting wishes like my ancestors were once prone to do, with a price of course. I want to live here, that will be the price you must pay, and in the process I will fill your halls with, if not true life, then with something at least close to it.”
The house lightly taps it’s shutters twice, as if to say, “Well, alright.”
* * *
A month passes and the house and its inhabitant grow fond of one another. The goblin works on what he calls “mini-mechs,” small clockwork creatures made in the image of the animals that live in the forest and fields that surround the house. Mice and spiders, birds and butterflies, a raccoon, cats, a couple of frogs, even a large lynx that the goblin spotted in the mines once while passing an air vent roam the halls and rooms of the house, along with various combinations of animals, like frogs with eight spider legs, butterbunnies with two foot wings, and battles, beetles with leathery bat wings. The house feels energized from the activity and tries to will its windows into transparency whenever the sun rises in the morning and shines on the goblin’s tools and parts spread out on his worktable. Twitching frog limbs and silvery mechanical feline heads. The parts and pieces of each mechanical being are made by “dust bunnies,” little whirligig tumbleweeds that gallop up and down the walls and float on the morning breezes as they suck up dust. When a new part is ready they fall to the floor wherever they are and bust open, spilling a cog here or a spring there. The house creaks floorboards and rattles windows as the goblin nears dismantled dust bunny bodies during the afternoon search. The goblin speaks to the walls and floors, telling the house what the new parts will make and thanking it for the use of its dust.
One particularly cloudy evening as the cold is frosting the windows and the darkness inside the house is fought by the mini-mech fireflies, the goblin finds a dust bunny stuck in a hole in one of the house’s smaller rooms. The goblin picks it out gently with two fingers and lightly blows it into the air. A few of the fireflies twirl down into the dark hole and the house sighs. Intrigued, the goblin pulls up the loose floor board and reveals an old moth-eaten journal. MaryAlice is written on the cover. The goblin opens it and begins to read the first entry:
July 11
My grandma once told me that you have to really live in the world to have it remember you. She said that as long as you live like you mean it, then you can live forever because the world will never forget you. I know that I will never forget her. I know that she will always live in this old house and that just because she’s died doesn’t mean that she is gone. She is always here. When my door squeaks open in the morning and the sun shines through my window, and when the house moans in its sleep at night, I know she’s there. I see her all the time in my dreams, just standing there at the foot of my bed, smiling. In my dreams I jump out of bed and giver her a big hug and she lifts me up and holds me really tight. I give her a kiss on the cheek and we go downstairs to have a midnight snack. So I know she’s here. Momma can never see her, she says she wishes that she could dream about her as much as I do. Momma was sad for a long time, but she’s happy again now. She says that she believes me when I say that grandma is in the house at night, but she also said that she didn’t believe me for a long time. Momma didn’t want to live here for a long time after grandma died. She used to say that she was stuck with this old house and it was going to make her crazy. Now, she says that she doesn’t want to go. I don’t want to go either.
~Mary
* * *
Big trucks show up at the house one evening. They carry bulldozers and a crane with a wrecking ball. For a month the goblin and the mini-mechs protect the house from the machine’s attempts at demolition. The house sits, silent and scared, hope sinking down into it’s basement and leaking through the cracks in the floor. The mini-mech mice crawl into the fuse boxes of the trucks and chew through the wires. The lynx and the birds break into the drivers seats and spend the nights filling them with branches and dirt. The raccoon twists off the fuel caps and stuffs dust bunnies in. The gasoline isn’t heavy enough to bust the bunnies when they are full, so the whirligig balls bounce around in the tanks absorbing fuel until the raccoon lets them out.
The workers get angry and can’t understand how people a breaking in because the house is in the middle of nowhere. They set up watch the next time they come to demolish the house. The raccoon is spotted by one of the men. The magic that animates the clockwork fails on sight and the mini-mech raccoon swirls back into dust.
They take their machines to get fixed and come very early one morning. “Alright Al, let her have it.” BOOM! SMASH! SHATTER! BANG! ROAR! The house screeches and bellows in agony as the wreaking ball crashes into it. The bulldozers then push the scattered remains down into the basement where it is set ablaze. Only the half melted basement doorknob is rescued because one of the clockwork mice pulls it out. The mouse was spotted though, and fell into its component dust particles.
* * *
The next day the goblin appears back at the empty, charred site. He sends the only thing he grabbed on his escape, when the house was first struck, into the crater of the basement. The lone dust bunny floats down and lands in the ash. With a little spark and a crack it falls apart and a brass key is left in its wake. The goblin jumps down, retrieves the key and fits it into the soot covered doorknob. With a tiny click, the lock engages. He smiles and walks into the forest with the coming of a new day’s dawn.