First, the dryer broke. Then the walkie-talkie in Brian’s room. Then my mother-in-law’s little marble angels lined along the topmost shelf of our china cabinet. No doubt we were being tested in some divine way, likely by the god of domestic mishaps, with all his elaborate wirework and minor humiliations. Whatever the case, it was the first time since Miles’ birth that we considered going back to church. Or calling an electrician.
My mother-in-law suggested we have an exorcism performed on our house. Brian objected on the grounds that it would reflect badly on its market value. That was before our family terrier Ty-Ty sprinted into the living room mid-argument and led us out into the backyard with her frantic barks. When we got out, we found the entire roof of her doghouse engulfed in biblical flames. I caught Brian googling how to survive hellfire as the firefighters tried to control the situation. The flames danced like they knew something we didn’t.
The situation was getting out of hand rapidly. We didn’t know what to do, how to deal with the stress of it all. We hired the best handymen in the tri-state area to come and have a look at our house. No one could come up with a plausible explanation for what was going on. People at the municipality told us that electrical shortages were quite common in our neighborhood and that more and more houses seemed to be inflicted by these freak events. Each development added another crack to the foundation of our sanity, as if the house itself were plotting against us. We cried into our pillowcases and prayed to the unmoving ceiling fans. Brian had to double the frequency of his visits to the therapist. My mother-in-law started seeing other mother-in-laws. Ty-Ty spent most of her time under the dinner table, brooding. I took on a habit of calling my postpartum doula every evening for much-needed relief.
Even Miles seemed to be affected by the developments despite his young age. He was visibly more anxious than usual in the absence of the collective hum of electronic devices in the house. He grew agitated, reportedly biting the hands of his peers at the kindergarten. His skin grew flaky due to stress. His teachers said it would be for the best if Miles took some time off until things improved at home. We agreed, though we didn’t know how to make that happen for him.
The last straw was when Brian came down with fever. He sneezed all day long and had to take time off work. He grew more careless than usual. He ran into the furniture and left dirty mugs behind like a bad dog. Even my mother-in-law looked down on her son with disdain in her eyes. The tension between us had gradually blown out of proportion. We didn’t yet know we were enacting our own little Lord of Flies in the crampedness of our house—our marriage the shipwreck; our house the island; our backyard the dirty ocean.
One day, the lights in our house went out and never came back. All electronic devices stopped working simultaneously and withered into silence like dying stars. We were stranded in the noise of our minds and reunited in the company of a common enemy to channel our frustration. We imagined each other’s bodies in the dark. We assumed the shapes of our shadows.
Sarp Sozdinler has been published in Electric Literature, Kenyon Review, Shenandoah, Wigleaf, HAD, Hobart, X-R-A-Y, Maudlin House, and Pithead Chapel, among other journals. He edits the literary journal The Bulb Region.
Image: David Levêque, unsplash.com
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Heavy Feather Review 