House #1 has potential. Good bones, the producer tells you. Just needs a dash of paint, granite countertops in the kitchen, some stainless-steel appliances. Scrape off all the popcorn ceiling and tear up the carpet that smells like 1986. But first the crew takes shot after shot of a stain that’s spattered across the living room floor, as if that somehow explains your presence. (This, while you get your makeup done, the producer saying Paler, paler, you need to be paler, and the AP caking you with floury, luminous powder.) They’ll color-grade the stain in post until it’s no longer a grapey purple but the goriest of reds. (Spilled juice. Toddler, the producer later tells you.) Not that the toddler or its parents are here. Instead, the crew brings in photogenic extras and a dog, even though you told them you were allergic. The producer waves away your protest and says don’t worry about it, it’s the kind without dander, and it’s not like you can inhale its fur or anything. It’s not like it can kill you, she says, and her AP laughs. Ignore the dog, she says. Focus on the stain. But how can you focus when the dog won’t stop barking—at you? At the AP who’s waving his arms wildly just out of shot? At its own neurotic, quivering shadow? It’s the kind of rat-faced shit your ex always cooed over, the same kind she paid over a grand for after finding her own place. As it pisses on the carpet, you stifle a sneeze.
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House #2 is a late Victorian, one you swear you’ve seen on season 1 back when you and your ex would watch it together, those Saturday morning marathons, you with the remote in your hand, your ex swiping on her phone. When you ask the producer about it, she insists they never recycle houses, that everything is authentic, then she yells at the crew to finish covering the Ikea furniture with dusty shrouds. She has you stand at the top of a broken stair, the one the crew isn’t allowed to go up because it’s too unsafe, but the light’s the best there, the way the dust filters about your silhouette. Below you, the agent—a raspy voiced medium who fell out of some 1970s wardrobe—glides across splintered floorboards, waving her arms at the gilt-framed portraits the crew hung earlier that morning. Foley artists will amplify the medium’s footsteps, will add a tinkling piano in the background. Isn’t it grand? she keeps saying to the rotting millwork, the soot-stained marble fireplaces, the clouded mirrors that reflect nothing. She steps over a broken chandelier and calls it marvelous. When she pulls the big reveal and says it’s a hundred thousand under budget, the producer prompts you to act surprised, to think back to something that startled you. They shoot eleven takes of you trying to remember the way the light framed your ex, the way she steadied herself against the doorjamb, the way her keys trembled in her hand as she said I deserve to be happy. Finally, they settle for a shot of you smile-grimacing and say, it’s as good as it’s going to get.
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House #3 is, of course, the house you already picked, the one you found not long after you contacted the show and said you wanted to apply. You’ve been living in it for months now waiting for the shooting schedule to commence. Haunting, the producer corrects. You don’t live anywhere, she says, and she and her AP laugh and laugh and high-five one another. Remember, pretend you’re seeing it for the first time, the producer says. And try not to look at the camera this time. Just talk about how you want your new forever home to be. You nod and think about the word “forever,” really think about it, how you’ve already settled into a rhythm of watching television with your new family in the chair they leave empty for you. They’re not photogenic, this family, but they’re grounded and living their own lives the way living people do, the way your ex says you never did. Now that the novelty of your presence has worn off, they mostly ignore you, and it’s not so different from when you were alive, in those last few years with your ex, or later when living with your daughter’s family, or later still when she suggested that maybe it was time you finally moved on—and by on, she meant out. She found you the tenth-floor apartment, the one with double-paned glass that shut out the city, shut out everything, the one with the empty high ceilings that absorbed all sound. There was a chandelier there too, but it held, and still no one noticed, not for weeks. And now you sit in your chair as your new family drifts by, almost floating, and when the light catches them just right, you swear you can see right through them.
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Joshua Jones Lofflin’s writing has appeared in The Best Microfictions 2020, The Best Small Fictions 2019, The Cincinnati Review, CRAFT, Fractured Lit, Moon City Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, and elsewhere. He lives in Maryland. Find him on Twitter @jjlofflin or visit his website: jjlofflin.com