Chapter Text
Everything has a use.
Yes, whether that’s a Skechers shoe box held together by duct tape or three French presses of the same model (two in silver, one in gold that now looks copper). After all, you never know when you might want three slightly metallic cups of coffee at the exact same time or a place to bury your hopes and dreams.
The insides of a house, its skeleton and guts, are ugly. There’s clumped up bunnies of dust, wires, tubes, fiberglass insulation that makes your lungs hurt, and layers upon layers of spiderwebs. The only part that you find worth looking at is the long vent that you couldn’t see before your father ripped out the ceiling. Its metal is a watercolor of shiny, dull, and other varying degrees of glimmery gray. It’s ugly, but not as much as the rest of what you see, so you keep your eyes trained on the vent strip.
“Right now, we’re basically walking on concrete.” You turn your head to the wooden floor your father’s talking about. You’re not on it right now, not standing like he is - you’re sitting on a very large, wooden toolbox. It’s not filled with tools, but rather with grain and whiskey. “It’s just sucking the heat from our place,” he makes a schloop noise in what seems to be an impression of the floor, “so I’m planning on removing the wood and putting insulation down there. We’ll put plywood on top, make a vapor wave.” You nod along like you know what a vapor wave is other than an aesthetic.
You’re surrounded by garbage. You’re surrounded by cardboard boxes acting as matryoshka dolls, drywall, other evidence of your father’s demolition, and antique furniture that makes everything smell like moths and the elderly. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure, it seems.
There’s a maple-leaf-shaped candle holder from New Orleans on the wall, a carbon dioxide tank with a red hose in one of the many wooden baskets, approximately five teapots (the one from Russia is your favorite) stowed away within what you call the ‘secretary’ (it’s an interesting mix between a cabinet and folding desk, around ninety years old, though you’d have to ask Dad). Then, there’s a mix-and-matched tea set that isn’t actually a set since there’s only three cups, around thirty soda bottles filled with different types of grain stacked on top of the kitchen cabinets, and an old rocking chair that your father feels sentimental over because his dead dog’s teeth marks are on the legs.
“Hey, what if we get a wood stove!” Your father’s laughter is what brings you back to the toolbox and wood floor. Oh, he’s already scoping out where to put it - save me, Shiva Guatama Christ-Chan.
“Why?” Your protocol is to test out the water when it gets like this, probe the situation with conversation. “It doesn’t really sound like a good idea.”
It’s so annoying having your life dictated by someone else’s shit self-esteem.
“Now, okay, remember last winter when the power went out?” Your father swings his arms around as he speaks, like making himself bigger will make him… righter. “If we had a wood stove we wouldn’t have to worry about that. We’d still have heat, a way to cook food, we could easily live off the grid for at least a week.”
“The power only went out for a couple of hours.”
“Yeah, okay.” He sighs. He does that a lot. “What about next winter? What if we get a real bad ice storm, like grandma’s house? Gosh, every seven or ten years there’s always a huge ice storm that takes out that neighborhood for weeks.”
“She lives on the other side of the country. We don’t get ice storms here.”
“You never know.” You shift uncomfortably on the toolbox. “And that’s not all! You know, it looks like Russian hackers are targeting the power grid.” He wiggles his fingers and hunches over in a typing motion.
At times like these, you feel like your eyes might roll to the back of your head and you’ll crumple over, dead. “…okay.”
“That’s also one of the reasons why we should get rid of the floor. If we put insulation there, it’ll keep us nice and cozy.” You feel physically unable to verbally agree now, so you go back to nodding.
It’s going to be like this tomorrow, too.