How long will I be cleaning that house out of my ears? Picking it’s floorboards from between my teeth with the prong of a hammer, plucking my father’s collection of crushed Miller Lite cans like gunk wedged between my toes, wiping away the hardened chunks like the husk of my mother’s heart from the inner corners of my eyes. How long will it take to fully disentangle myself from that place? Is it insane for me to shop online for “ear swabs made of steel,” or “nail picks that shoot fire,” in an effort to eviscerate that house from my body? I don’t know what else to do. Every time I argue with my husband, the house comes out. I spit up lamp cords strung with crystal ornaments, Thermoses full of warm wine, My Little Pony’s with glittery manes, chlorine and barbeque smoke, ammunition covered in backyard soil, a first communion dress that smells like a dusty attic, photographs where we’re all smiling but no one is happy. It’s like scrubbing at hardened grease with a soft sponge. It’s like trying to clean whites without bleach. It’s like trying to keep hair from slipping down the drain, to keep it from knotting into a wad that will clog and cause the water to overflow, spill out onto the floor, wetting my husband’s feet, and always right as he’s leaving for work. No matter how hard I try, I keep finding that house, and all its memories, burrowed and hibernating in my belly button like a brown bear in a cave, stuffed up my nasal passageways making it hard to breathe, under my fingernails, under my skin, which I pick and scratch whenever I need to distract myself. And that house, it is heavy. And it is hard work. And it is a load I would like very much to put down. And I am the load. And I am the house, on two legs. I carry it with me everywhere I go, and while I try so hard to keep it all to myself some of it falls out and god my husband, my friends, even strangers off the street, they ask, “do you need some help with that?” And they reach down and pick up the belt, the quarters my sister and I used to hold against the wall with our noses, kneeling on the hardwood floor, the orange pill bottles that filled every drawer, the VHS tape of Toy Story recorded over with porn, cradling it in their hands as if it is a precious piece of me, and it’s the way they all look at me that makes me want so badly, so, so badly, to drop the whole thing. To leave that house condemned wherever I am, and watch as wrecking crews raze it to the ground.

Kendra Marie Pintor (she/her) is a rising author of speculative horror from Southern California, with work appearing in Lunch Ticket, Fast Flesh Literary Journal, CRAFT Literary, FOLIO LIT, and LEVITATE Magazine. Her story “The Sluagh” has been nominated for Best American Science Fiction/Fantasy and was selected by Alternating Current Press for the 2023 Best Small Fictions Anthology. Kendra is a graduate of the University of La Verne’s creative writing program and the 2022 UMass Amherst Juniper Summer Writing Institute.