A woman eats her way through the house, starting at the top and working down, the way her mother taught her to clean.
She starts in the attic, chewing insulation and gnawing an old rusty fan that her husband ran all summer to cool the house. Then she works her way through beams and roof tiles and chimney bricks, freeing the house to open sky.
She tackles the bedrooms, clearing the master bedroom first — her husband’s clothes in the closet and dresser, the one good jacket he bought for himself not long before he died. She finds old boots that remember the shape of his feet, wanting them even though they taste of sweat-soaked leather. She swallows his baton from winning the all-city relay race in high school and a motorcycle helmet from his trips out west with his brother. She gulps down his watches and hers, his old pairs of glasses and hers, photos of his parents and hers. It’s easy then to swallow the mattress with his dent and hers in the middle. The drywall chokes her throat.
Her son’s bedroom is easier to take in — old stuffed toys, lego, picture books, his single mattress and little dresser and desk, but his clothes are already gone. She chews the triangular bin that her husband made to give him some storage space. She can see the jagged staircase below, which she chews step by step on her way to the main floor.
She devours the dining table and sideboard, the piano he gave her as a wedding present, the recliner rocker with its hidden bits of pretzels and peanuts, the television he watched late into the night, a chess set she bought him for one of his birthdays, games of scrabble and monopoly that they used on their cross-country travels.
Then there’s the kitchen, full of pots and pans, candles, cleaning fluid, telephone books, and lingering smells from the meals she cooked — spaghetti carbonara, lamb roast, macaroni with three cheeses, quarts and quarts of homemade spaghetti sauce. She’s engorged, and there’s still the basement.
Down the wooden stairs, she gobbles tents from family camping trips, sleeping bags, snorkels, fishing poles, the cooler, the workbench her husband made for himself out of wood he brought home from his father’s house, rusty nuts and bolts he saved in old coffee tins, pliers, screwdrivers, a vise. She digests his unfinished projects — the cracked vase he promised to glue, old toys he never got around to cobbling back together for their son, the door that would never open.
When she has eaten everything, even the foundation, she stands in the hollow that’s left, and stares at the sky. Days and nights pass with rain and snow, sun and heat. She breathes deeply, waiting to see what will happen next, but nothing does.
She scratches some footholds in the packed walls of earth and starts to climb.
