There are people who can turn into houses, and my mother is one of them. Her story goes like this. She was seeing her sibling for the first time in five years. My mother, the house, sat on a little grassy perch by the beach, where spiral shells crawled ashore and the children built sandcastles, waged wars. Her sibling was passing through on their way to the next town.
“How is it, being a house?” her sibling asked. “Do you miss the sand between your toes? Do you miss traveling?”
“I do not,” the house said. “In a rapidly changing world, there is comfort in planting yourself.”
The sibling fiddled with something in their teeth. “Why a house? Why not a tree?”
“I knew a man who could turn into a tree,” the house replied. “When they cut him down, he stayed for a while, nourished by the roots of the trees surrounding him, until they too fell, and existence was never lonelier.
“A house, then—I wanted people to choose me. I wanted to seem complete. When people look at a tree, they think it is incomplete—they chop it down, carve it up, run it through to sawdust.” In thought, the house darkened.
Her sibling stood up. “Who lives here?”
“I do.”
“I mean, inside of you.”
“People come and go,” my mother, the house, said. And with an edge: “Like you.”
The children on the beach were digging moats. They were tempering the ocean into muddy rings and sealing themselves inside.
“I want people to choose me,” she continued. “No one stays.”
When night washed up, the sibling went inside their house-sister to sleep. The house thought that maybe she felt lonelier than that chopped-down tree. The sky grew a beard, and she transformed back into a woman, her sibling inside, and it rained a thousand sorries, and molten neon, and apples clenched so hard they burst when they touched the ground, and omens of crows, hungry, picking the beach clean of texture and sound.
It is the story of a woman who could turn into a house and back, whose sibling had left them before and was going to leave them again, unless.
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My mother is normal, and then, in an instant, she has a bit of that house in her. Shingles combed back, brickburnt skin. We just had our first big fight and looked each other in the eye—that’s when I saw them, my mother’s sibling. I didn’t know who it was at first. I only saw the little person like a reflection in her eye, an empty fireplace, a reading nook… and I went, “Oh,” and held the car for balance.
We were fighting about whether I would go with her or stay here, in a motel off Highway 87, a scab of desert where I’d met a girl I thought was the love of my life. Scraps of paper flew about the salt hills and the crows were taking them for their nests. A tumbleweed startled by.
And I thought the stakes were low: I’d catch up with my mother in a month or two, take a bus or a train up to Eugene. But she was adamant, shaken—convinced a couple months would turn into a couple years, and then I’d never see her again. She’d keep moving, and I wouldn’t be able to find her.
“But you’d find me,” I said, and she looked despondent.
“I don’t know,” she kept saying. “Maybe not. I just don’t know.”
The heat left her face. I followed the heat inside. Down the corridor to Ori, her sibling, my namesake. They were throwing logs into the fireplace, lighting a match. They looked up at me, through the whites of my mother’s eyes, and they seemed to invite me over.
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She was always wearing dark glasses. She told me it was for light sensitivity, but now I know what she was hiding.
We lived out in the open, but between us, conversation never was. It wasn’t that she didn’t love me. She just loved me in a different sort of way—not head on, but something all-encompassing, like air or fog. Her love was harder to pinpoint, but it was always there, an atmosphere. I got acclimated. We could just sit together for hours, saying nothing, and that was enough. The fewer toys she bought me, the less I would have to outgrow.
One time, my mother and I got separated at a county fair. What I felt—it stretched me wide open. It put a hole in me. And from that hole, a little me creatured its way out, pounded against my inner walls, and broke things. I became afraid of my own hands. Eventually, I found a lonely little tent at the corner of the fair, an abandoned Whac-A-Mole booth, and I went over to one of the machines and stuck my hands in the holes. I drove them in with such force that the moles entered a part of the game foreign to them—I could almost hear them squealing. It was many hours before my mother finally found me.
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After the fight, we sit on the hood of the car, my mother fishing around the cooler for two cans of Coke.
I hold her hand, reaching through her to my namesake. “Can they leave?”
“No. I can’t even find my own doors.”
“Can you let them out?”
“I don’t know how.” When my mother cries, it sounds like rain tapping against the windowpane. “I travel so that they can see the world.”
My hands buzz. “How could you do that? Trap your own sibling inside, when they trusted you?”
She cups her hands over her eyes, curtains closing.
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In the mothy motel room, my mother falls asleep with her eyes open, and I hear Ori speak for the first time.
“Sometimes it is need dressed as love. A need like that will take and take. Your mother cannot help it. It arrives like a storm or a stomach after lifetimes of giving to others.
“I am a part of your mother now. Inside, I can see her for who she is. The closed throat. The impenetrable eyes. I hold that understanding with my grief for the life I’ve lost. Sometimes I think of what my life would be like without her.”
“You hate her,” I say. “Maybe I would too, if I was trapped.”
“But I do not hate her,” says Ori, my namesake. “I am not trapped in a house. She has whole planets asleep inside of her. And rooms she doesn’t even know exist. Corridors that go on for miles. A labyrinth—”
“Enough,” I hear myself say. The word floats, disembodied. “I don’t need to know. I don’t want to know.” I climb into my bed and roll my back to my mother, to Ori.
An hour later, as I take my first step onto that bridge to the dream world, Ori speaks. “Let go.” And though they whisper, the words stretch across the room like a shroud. “Your mother’s heart is quicksand, or a drowning woman. Take your life. It is yours.”
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Morning shows up. My mother has packed my bag for me. It sits at the foot of the bed. She is already in the front seat, staring ahead, and when I go outside, she starts the car and rolls down the window. Her dark glasses holding back, holding me. “Well, are you coming?”
I throw my bag into the back seat.
Driving away, we listen to shoegaze and pass a can of coke back and forth and all the buildings look like crooked teeth, jutting out in different directions.
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Anjali Ravi is a writer from Maryland and 2024 graduate from the University of Colorado, Boulder’s MFA program. They are currently writing a novel about a never-ending house.