Alistair Discovers a Minor Structural Issue

Act 1

Valentine’s Day

We have reached the snowless part of winter in the humble American town of Kingsley, when a curtain of overcast is drawn over the sky, and the air hurts with deep sadness. The elementary school is done up in pink, pretty hearts in the windows, made by kids too young to have no idea what love is. People don’t go outside if they can help it. You can see a housewife or two carrying groceries back home from the store, or a runner from the local college taking a less-popular route through the downtown on the break between her classes. Otherwise, it’s empty. Nearly everyone’s inside, completing whatever tasks they’ve ascribed their lives to.

Enter Alistair.

Yep. That’s me. I bet you’re wondering how I got myself in this situation. Well, here’s how.

Act 1, Scene 1 - Alistair Discovers a Minor Structural Issue

Gravel crunched underneath the tires of Alistair’s ‘92 Ford Sierra. It had been his mother’s car, but she upgraded, and Alistair hadn’t had much of an income for a while, so this car was the best he could get. The radiator wheezed out whatever meager things it wanted to pass on to Alistair; his knuckles were bone white on the steering wheel. He unclenched, put the parking brake on, and tried his best to open the door. Sometimes it stuck shut, and he’d have to leave through the passenger’s side. Today wasn’t one of those days.

Soon as his feet touched the ground, the bullmastiff on the other side of the fence charged, propped its front paws wherever the fence would hold them, let out a massive BWOOF that caused Alistair to jump back, nearly lose his footing.

“Stupid dog,” mumbled Alistair, recomposing himself.

“Bwoof! Bwoof!” bwoofed the stupid dog, projecting its breath from deep within its chest, and the white picket fence trembled against it.

Alistair sighed deeply, shut the car door, withdrew attention from the dog, started up the gravel walkway to the dark wooden front door of the Kingsley House. Two years ago, Alistair couldn’t have fathomed being a homeowner. “I’m part of the generation that will never own a house,” he’d joke with Mr. Kingsley even though his soon-to-be father-in-law never found his humor funny. “I’ve made my peace with that.” And Mr. Kingsley would shake his head and convince him to come to terms with the fact that maybe his daughter had fallen in love with a failure.

The Kingsley House had been, to Alistair, more of an encumbrance than an inheritance. Somehow, the driveway always needed to be shoveled, the lawn mowed, the leaves raked, the garden watered. Alistair had been ill-equipped for the personal investment a house would take; his parents lived in an apartment complex.

“It’s not really your inheritance,” Val would chide. “It was willed to me. Until we’re married, you’re kind of just a squatter.”

“I’m not a squatter,” Alistair would say. “If anything, I’m a renter.”

“Pray tell, what rent do you pay?”

And Alistair would lower his voice and say, “My body,” and then Val would smack his shoulder or kiss him deeply and collect rent the best she could.

Alistair swung open the screen door, stuck his key in the lock, turned it, swung the door wide open. “Honey, I’m home,” he called in his best 1960s sitcom voice, down the entry hallway and into the bowels of a house he presumed empty. He stamped the dirt off his shoes on a scratchy green doormat, kicked them into the corner next to the doorway, swung the front door shut behind him, ambled down the marble-white tile in his socks. Val’s van wasn’t in the driveway. He had some time alone.

Alistair took a right turn into the Master Bedroom; Jon Kingsley had done him the service of not dying there. Would have been weird, sleeping in the room where Val’s dad had died. Still, he took some issue with Val’s affinity for the recliner in the den, the room and specific chair where Jon Kingsley’s life had some to an end. Cuddling in a chair where his would-have-been father-in-law had died? A little weird. Sleeping in the same room where Val was conceived? Somehow less creepy.

Al dropped his jeans, tossed them lazily into a net hamper in the corner of the room, pulled up a pair of soft pajama pants Val had bought him on clearance the spring before.

“I don’t need warm pajama pants,” he’d told Val that May. “The weather’s turning. I’d sweat like a hog.” And Val had flashed that knowing smile, and then they moved into a house where the Master Bedroom didn’t have heating.

Alistair sat on the queen-sized bed, patted his pockets for his phone, cursed under his breath, stood up, walked to the hamper, fished his pants from the hamper and his phone from his pants pocket. Sat back down, this time on the foot of the bed. Noted the battery percentage. Glanced to the electrical outlet next to his nightstand. Sighed. Stood back up.

Alistair’s phone charger was in the living room, he suddenly remembered, because Val had asked for it that morning while curled up in her father’s death-chair. Both of their phones used that same long black Type C charger that also worked for Alistair’s $75 Chromebook. Val had taken one charger with her to work, and Alistair did the same, leaving one at the house for domestic purposes. It was all compatible in the Fawkes-Kingsley household.

So Alistair stepped out of the bedroom, down the hall, took a right turn into the living room, flicked on the incandescent ceiling light, looked down to the right to the socket by the death chair. There the charger was, leeching vampirically off of the wall socket; Alistair stooped to unplug it.

And then he caught the sound of something wet in his ear, like the rapid dripping of a faucet.

Alistair stood up straight. As a new homeowner, he had learned to become attuned to anything that could have sounded like a problem. He’d gone through the same changes when he got his first car. Alistair drew the thick burgundy curtains back on the living room window, looked outside. Suppressive overcast as far as the eye could see, but no rain. It wasn’t that, for certain. Alistair traced the walls with his eyes, looking for wet spots in the white-maroon floral wallpaper that Val’s long-deceased mother had picked out. His gaze fell to the black-and-white portrait Val had hung up of Jonathan Kingsley after she had inherited the house; he was young in the picture, but his eyes always had that deep-burning aggression. Alistair shuddered, noted something pooling on the top of the metallic black plastic frame, dripping down along the sides of it, onto the uncarpeted part of the hardwood floor, soaking back into the floorboards. Not pooling. The liquid was darker than water, thicker; deep oxidized red.

“Val,” said Alistair into his phone a minute later. “I think our wall is bleeding.”

Thank you so much for reading! Next chapter, whenever I remember!

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