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There’s always one glowing window of the house. Only one. To have more would totally fail the house’s style. A standing, scattering noise face, with a single shape of auroral reference. She feels sensual, debauched in a good way, with just one window lit. Lately, the uppermost right, third and top story, from streetview, has been her favorite; two criss-crossing strips of dark wood zoning the four panes of emanant unsubstance, shining way above the ground. This corner spot hides its light from the rest of the home’s cast, and so also reveals how many of the slats and doors and balcony dead-botany are left in shadow, darkly wheeling down and to the side. The bulb inside, specialized and ordered from friends of deep-tunnel, lets on a kind white mist to something massing and revivingly detailed there, hidden in the rest of the building. There have been other windows attempted, for similar livering affects. For awhile, the house tried the small bathing window, halfway up the side-wall perpendicular to the street, the side-breast of her structure, but that just left a looming convalescent enigma in front, sans much mystery. The passerby took only to looking at the house when down the street, catching a lateral, albeit pleasing, site of the little footed window, evanescent and lonely. But the house is more confident from a straight-on angle; anyways, her flank is a little thick for comfort. Of course, the house chose settling in an abode of ocular void, a lot of total darkness, sunlight being possibly the most boring aesthetic, in her opinion. Plus, all her soily bulges make shadows under the sun that she really wishes she could thin out. The sun hasn’t come this side of the copse in years, assuringly. The top rightmost window feels perfect for now, with the moon’s multiplex and effects. Just enough letting on, a darting of the spires lifting with a tickle of bottomed-out light. And the black-and-white lantanas in this window’s flower box look delicious so a-lit.

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Now, she’s experimenting. Black paint smearing her frames, sometimes a little jagged and sometimes flowing. A black coat over the roof. She doesn’t know. The door’s a new lush purple, with some pink shading near the middle like wound-up lips. Not that anyone sees, or looks, anymore. The convenience-store never called back. Well, who needs him and that sweet cardboardy scent. She, sure as a pyrobunny, doesn’t. They met easily, they talked about Dario Argento. They went down to the lake a few times. Then they went three nights in a row, dipping with their porches in skinny. She took to certitude, and bathed her walls in it. With an expectant light she waited. But then she waited too long, for the message he foretold with a glitchy smile in his neon way never delivered. She distractedly scratched frantic circles with her fingers into the gloomy ground. Each nightingale’s passing chirp and tree’s leaking creak and breath of hearth became torture; her chandelier trembled, lowered itself on metal strings to the bare surface of the stone table, mere feet from the phone. Finally, she let go and rocked back into her foundation, feeling a depraved ghoul of a house and closed her blinds and removed the window’s glow, and condemned it, with blurry-intent, slammed open the door and threw the bulb out to the street, where it shattered upon the asphalt, like a marionette’s ass. There was a moment of halcyon, the grave of her night, hot in her ears, and slowly she closed her door almost all the way, then waited, then closed it all the way, and in doing so opened her brand-new penumbra of deject. Her garden’s hose began and didn’t stop till the gnomes left, or drowned. She didn’t eat, losing all the wood in her guest room. Her attic was cut-up, dilapidated mind. But eventually, after personal eclipse, cavity-like darkness, she remembered some areas of herself, and found new ones. She slowly took to renovation like a goth television star. Black oily paints smeared around the window frames, ecstasy pills swallowed alone. Designed her mailbox’s little door like a tombstone, candles in the kitchen, mainly listening to Xiu Xiu. Now, though, it’s all for her. No passerby stops and none look and time is piercing pink eventually and her bulbs take on new meaning, for her and her alone.

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The porch light is on. She’s entered a new shadow, reveling, revealing. Delicate fable, color in the contrasts. She opens the door to place the cigarette in reach of her throat, and with the opportunity spiders and mice slip through and find rest. The windows are flashing, glowing one at a time, still just one at a time but now in movement: leftmost second floor, left of the door, window in the garret, then down, rear, door, the bedroom on the right side, the peak of the center, and then the porch light, back on. Her welcome mat says WELCOME, BITCHES! and the spires grow and fractalize, winds twisting around like carnivals. Three stories, nine stories, and more for the children being tucked into bed. Rose petals pour into the yard and cremated kisses set themselves on panes. She is vivacious with cake and benevolent toward down-and-out entities. Disturbed elementary school paintings. Fetishized pipe organs. Porcelain patchwork. The windows are luminescent in turn, calling out and arching their backs for maximum pleasure. Ivy gerbils, stained-glass raspberries run along her gutters. There are large and small spiders, everywhere. She’s internalized the teleology of bracelets and universal chemical suffrage. Below her smooth pale navel, the welcome mat reads SAD CROSSING. Nothing leaks from the attic. There are clouds in her cuckolds. Internal doorways open and feel presences and she’s open to them, she likes growth and her chimney’s ascension and the adding of wooded rooms full of rolling mirrors. She’s taken to going within herself, wandering the lacy halls, the bodices of her structure, and the windows’ shutters make happy noise like eerie babies in her presence. Her welcome mat says BABY, YOU’RE WELCOME and then NOBODIES ONLY and then MORTICIAN’S and her porch light is on on on.

Zachary Margaret can be be found @diespleen19.