To Weather the Storm

If walls could talk, and I’m sure that they can, they would tell tales untold by human tongues.

Ever-present, the walls are, and ever watchful. One might think that they are alone in the night, only themselves, the bed, and the dark, but there are at least four walls, and usually more, that loom and look upon the sleepers, tentative and unperturbed alike. One might not even see the walls around them as they walk the streets, or shower off the day’s sweat and grime, or masturbate themselves, or set off bombs, or murder children. But who is it that continues to see as we sleep? As we turn our backs or close our eyes for the barest moment? It is the walls.

And they have voices, these walls, for a voice is naught more than what communicates, what is able to transfer information. First and foremost is always the visual. What does this wall look like? Is it stone, brick, wood, gypsum? What stains and blows mar it? What writing? When last was it skinned in paint? Touched up with plaster or mortar? What has happened to it? What has it seen? One questions the wall with their eyes. And to those eyes can come so many answers, so many tales.

Next comes the smell. Brick mangled and mutilated and throwing old dust, or freshly masoned? Rotten wood, or newly stained and finished? Gypsum blistering and bulging fatly with water, or just screwed on, mudded, taped, and top-coated? The nose can tell what the wall has seen, what has made the wall what it is.

The last is two-fold, for under normal circumstances one must be for the other to be. The wall does not speak, of course, not unless one touches it. One can knock on the wall to find its bones, can scrape their hand along it and scratch at it with their nails to test its skin, and in each stroke or blow, they will feel and hear the wall’s voice. What has it seen? What will it tell?

There is one thing I have not told you. I, too, am a wall. I know it is odd to hear, to read, but it is true; I am a wall. And I can tell you that I have a story to tell.

I was born with no name, of course, though in time I was given one. I was born not by a mother, as humans are born, but by a small team of men. One might call them my fathers. One of my fathers was, indeed, the ‘father’ of the house, the breadwinner, all of that. My other two fathers were his sons, making them, at the same time, my brothers. I know what you’re thinking, and no, I was not born in Alabama. It was in the Rocky Mountains that I was born, or more accurately, was erected. I think I’ll cease with the pretense and personification, for you know my secret now, even as you read this. You know I am a wall.

I was erected as one of a few walls in an addition to the house. It was a very old house, one now filled with a new family. I can communicate with other walls, too. That is how I know anything of history, science, architecture, mathematics, or languages foreign to that of the humans I live alongside. We walls see and hear, and we share the information we gather with our brethren, our family. And that is how I know that my house is very old, built in the late nineteenth century. It is almost like a body I am connected to (though I do have my own identity) and in that way, I can feel what the other walls feel, I can see what they see. Some of my older brothers and sisters were made of brick and mortar that has now begun to crumble, of vertical studs that now creak under their own weight, and of horizontal slats covered in layers of grey-white plaster that is cracked and throws thin dust with any vibration. But I and three others were made much more recently, with new two-by-fours treated to withstand decades of weathering, cut to length and nailed together. These are my bones, and betwixt them my flesh was stuffed in: insulation and wires and electrical boxes, so I can do my job as a wall well. We were made with sheetrock that was, only months before, still part of the Earth, with screws that had only existed as screws for half a year.

That was a very long time ago.

My family (not my brothers and sisters the walls, but the family of five that lived for years within our bounds) was down, and near to destitute. The father was a builder, and a good one (I was not even close to the first wall he had built, nor the last he would) but his income was not enough to fight the rising prices. Humans have to live with lights affixed to us walls and our cousins the ceilings, and they buy to illuminate their lives. They have to travel in cars that consume petroleum distillates and exude noxious fumes, and they buy to move about in their race of rats. Humans have to eat, and they buy to eat. Times were not good enough for him to buy a new house in this new town he found himself in, so he bought this one, this one that was older then than I am now. He promised himself he would fix it up, that he would make it better. And I can say, by my existence and the existence of things thereafter, that he did his best. The mother was a stay-at-home wife (back when I was made, those still proliferated) and she was wonderful, not only to me but to every wall. She would dust us and wash us and adorn us with paintings and knick-knacks and shelves of books. Old or new, fancifully built or utilitarianly, big or small, she treated us the same. And I can say that I loved her for that. The parents’ names were Marshall and Gina Stanhope.

Their children were three. The eldest two were boys, David and Carter, thirteen and eleven respectively, when I was built. The youngest, a girl by the name of Eva, was only five at that time and didn’t help at all to build me. But I didn’t then, and don’t now, begrudge Eva that. She and I had plenty of good time together, despite her not being present at my birth.

They three slept in the addition that I was a part of. There were four walls, one framed to house a closet. I was opposite this. David and Carter had small beds befitted with sheets that were clean but quite old, and atop these were, even into their early manhood, matching coverlets of dark blue, with portrayals of racing cars stitched in red and white. Black and white checkered flags were the covers of their pillows, inundating the boys with dreams of winning derbies and trophies. They slept with their heads to the opposite wall, the closet wall, and were thusly perpendicular to me. Eva’s bed, however, was parallel and butted up to me. At the foot of it was the door to the rest of the house, and on my good friend the door jam, the children had marked in pencil their respective heights. Those would continue to rise at yearly intervals, for where we walls are born at our height, the humans must grow.

Where David and Carter had tacked posters to their adjacent walls, Eva and her mother painted me with a field of daisies and lilies and red roses. Near to the top of me was a mass of large fluffy clouds and a hot yellow sun, the latter shining and seeming to give life and light to the room and to Eva’s eyes when she gazed upon me. As a last touch, Eva named me Hope, brushing it thin, yellow, and flowery into one of my corners. I, in my pride as her wall, thought at times to look out from that shining gold star more than from any other part of myself. I would look out, and she would look in, and in that, I found my purpose as a wall; I found my life in the life of this little girl, in her smile, in the bounce of her hair, and in her giggles when her brothers would make armpit farts or slap each other with pillows or tell funny dirty jokes; I found life and empathy in Eva when she would bicker with her brothers or her parents and come to her bed and to me, her wall, and cry herself to sleep, holding to her chest a little rag doll with ruby red hair, when she would come to me with her stomach rumbling for more than the mite of stewed beef and carrots and potatoes, when she would come to me with rambling frenzied thoughts of her own place and purpose in this world and reach out in the dark and trace the black flower petals writ on me. I could see and hear and feel all of these things in her, in my little girl. She faltered and she failed at times, as all humans do, but for all of that, for all of the shade of life, she flowered with the help of my painted sun.

For ten years I felt her grow.

The trouble began when I was eight years old, when Eva was thirteen. David and Carter, the former twenty-one, the latter nineteen, had not gone on to universities, nor had they the money to move out, but they did not share that room with Eva any longer. Some of the old grandfatherly walls had been knocked out and replaced by new ones when Marshall and Gina Stanhope’s finances had improved, and the boys’ beds went and were butted up to those walls, their posters leaving rectangles of whiter wall on my direct next of kin. Though all three had shot up like weeds in that passage of time, they kept the same beds, for finances were still not anywhere near stellar, so Eva laid long on her bed, still with the red-haired doll clutched to her now budding chest, and still, she would reach toward me at times and trace my petals. She would do it now with fresh melancholy and fresh tears, thoughts of place and purpose hiding beneath thoughts of her mother, of Gina Stanhope, and thoughts of the man that had taken her.

That man had been old, perhaps even as old as some of this house’s elderly walls. Gina Stanhope had been crossing the street with two brown paper bags. One was the gift of a sandwich from the deli for her husband; the other a bag of groceries, perhaps a roast, a small sack of potatoes, another of carrots, of celery. Or perhaps it had been milk and eggs and a pound of bacon. It mattered not a whit what Gina Stanhope was carrying, for when that old man ran her down with a Buick the size and shape of a tugboat, she and her groceries and the sandwich meant for her husband were plastered into a nearly homogenous mash of red and white that stained and streaked the black asphalt for a full forty feet.

How might I know this? I, the wall of flowers and sun?

I know it as any wall knows anything, for we have fair facsimiles of ears, and no care is taken to hide from us the secrets, the knowledge. No care is taken to quiet the frantic shouting voices, even when there are no ears to hear but ours. What are we but walls? What are we but ever-present bystanders built not to hear yet hearing all the same? Built not to speak yet speaking all the same.

Marshall took to the bottle, and that is how I know what gory details he knew. From the police, he knew some, and from seeing the remnants of the scene in the days and weeks afterward, he inferred yet more. And I and his children heard, as he drank, the secrets and the pain, and we gained our own from it. We heard as he grew to shouts and wroth wrought of alcoholic psychosis as much as by the death itself. They were shouts of purified pain and spinning confusion, shouts that had no aim but for the walls, shouts that bespoke all of the hatred a man can muster yet were possessed of no real target, for the man who smashed Gina Stanhope had been in the throes of a heart attack as he blew under crimson traffic signals, as his unknowing foot mashed the gas pedal and the car’s monster of an engine roared and backfired, as the grill passed over the lines of the crosswalk and took Gina Stanhope’s body and whipped it downward to the blacktop in a tiny fraction of a second, as it crushed her already dead body between rubber and steel and the hot, tar-smelling road.

The old man died of that heart attack, and it could be said that Gina Stanhope died of it too.

In a little over a year, Marshall Stanhope lost his job. He began to steal money from his sons to fund his new marriage with the bottle, and with their father as example, both boys took to the bottle as well, and to other drugs: anything that could heighten or dull the senses enough to throw a shade over their mother’s death. They funded him openly then and pulled him into the same substances they had discovered. How much we, the walls, wished then for voices in truth, voices that could beseech and demand and catechize from the depths of our pine-stud souls. How much we wanted to shout in return, to shout and turn our diminished family away from that tempest of degradation. But, of course, we could not. We have voices, and we have stories, but our words cannot always be obvious, nor can they be voiced in time to be interpreted by human eyes and ears and hands; it is long and longer that we tell our tales, and it is only with investigation that any others can hear them.

Those men did not want to hear. They did not want to know about the irreparable paths of corruption that came with the crutch whose façade was drug use, but whose body and soul were the act of moving death, moving their mother, into a shadowed mental corner, away from sight but able to fester and rot and stink so palpably as to ruin what life there might have been after that tragedy.

They bent to dealing petty amounts of drugs, just enough to fund their own habits and to avoid utter starvation. They housed very bad men and women, brought them in and let them stay just for another bump of methamphetamine or cocaine. Some used the house as a hotel, others squatted and continued to squat. These men and women plastered us with vulgarities and slurs, pictograms and graffiti. They broke us, put holes in us, washed us with only smoke and piss and shit and any number of bodily excretions. Men and women were raped here, their flailing arms and legs hitting us, their screams seeping into us further even than the stench of smoke and vomit. This house and its purpose were destroyed, slowly at first, but then nearly all at once, it became utterly unrecognizable.

Where, you might ask, was Eva?

Eva still went to school, unlike her brothers, who had graduated, so she was able to escape these men who had been her family but now were changed so completely as to be unknown to her. When she could not be away from the house, when she was not either in school or staying with some friend that would have her, Eva snuck into her room when she was sure the house’s unsavory guests and residents would be asleep. I remember those times. I remember cherishing them as much as hating them, for though I loved to see my little girl, loved to see her dealing with her mother’s death rather than only burying her in a shallow grave, I hated that she would risk coming here at all, for it was not what it had been; it was a dangerous and defiled place. And she would not escape the ramifications of her family’s degradation for much longer.

It was on the first day of Eva’s fifteenth year that her father decided she was old enough for her body to be sold, for it to be traded for pittances and drugs. It could have been that he thought her old enough, or it could have been that the idea had only then popped into his half-rotted brain. He was out of money, out of everything except the need for more, and though there were those that would have taken his body or those of his sons as payment, Eva was young and beautiful and tall for her age. She was thin, lacking a proper diet, but she was healthier than any other in that abhorrent pit that was once a home. She was the best currency.

I remember the first day, and I remember the man who first had her. His name was Randal Dunst, a man of six feet and five inches, broad and dark only with tattoo ink, bearded, quiet, and mean. I remember his eyes more than anything. They were cut from slate grey stones, their pupils tiny drops of oil that shimmered and danced with an equal mixture of nonchalance and sadistic glee.

Eva screamed as her father took her by the arm and gave her to that man. She writhed and cried and questioned. She beseeched her father, her brothers, and the God that may or may not exist but takes no hand if he does. She cursed them and hated them, and I, if I had had that sort of voice, would have done the same, but I could do nothing but stand by, rooted to the floor and to the ceiling and to the Earth below. I could only watch, anchored to that point in space and time, immobile and powerless, as Eva’s father slid the door shut and left to my eye and my ear only Eva and her captor. I could not recognize Marshall Stanhope, the very man who built me, any longer. His body was thin and limp, bereft of all that had brought me, and Eva herself, into being, and his eyes and the mind behind them were equally corrupted, naught now but a host for the worm of complacency, the parasite of forgotten and refuse intent. He was nothing, yet he was worse than nothing. He had given his creation, his wonderful young daughter, to an equally evil man for nothing more than the opportunity to get high, to further debase his mind and soul and intention. And he closed the door so he would not have to see and to hear, yet he left me with the burden. I saw. I heard.

Walls do not have throats to scream with, nor do we have eyes to cry with. Humans do. Little girls do.

It was a quick thing, this defilement, for Randal Dunst’s mind was far past standard perversions and was excited so by his act that it lasted only ten minutes. For him it must have been like a drug, the best drug to ever exist, body shaking, mind bending and breaking through to a hitherto unfathomed stage of perverse ecstasy. I have no doubt that it was at the same time quick and timeless for him, a world that was, to him, awash with the bright gold sun and white clouds and the sense of weightless flight, yet for Eva Stanhope, my little girl, was a nether region of pain and fear and newfound evil. Eva was bloody by the end, both in that place so coveted by the human man and about her face and her throat. He had slapped her and hit her in the mouth hard enough to draw blood and screams and had choked her near to unconsciousness, smearing his bloody hands about her throat and her chest.

The man came away like a man in a dream. He did not even regard the girl who he had ruined but only left her to whimper and gag and wheeze. And she could only curl up on the bed with her red-haired doll clutched to her and cry and trace my petals in the stinking dimness.

Randal Dunst was the first, but he was not the last. I cannot bear to tell or even think of the other times; the knowledge of just one of those corrupt acts is more than enough to unseat humanity in one’s eyes, to take it from its pedestal and throw it into the dirt where it belongs. It was not long until Eva found she had been impregnated. I do not know by whom she was given this abhorrent spawn, but I think, and Eva thought, that it was the first and worst of them, that it was Randal Dunst.

Before she was large enough for the fact to be known to anyone but herself and to me (in that way she and I achieved of near telepathy) Eva took the last modicum of control that was left her and did the only thing she, in her addled, fearful, and utterly broken mind, could have done. She broke an empty and forgotten bottle of liquor and used the largest and sharpest piece to open the veins of her inner forearms from elbow to wrist. She did not cry as she did so, nor did she even feel the pain. She only struck twice on each arm, hard and deep, and lay on her bed with her doll and traced the petal of one of my roses as the life ran from her and pooled across the old, yellowing bedspread. Eva Stanhope died looking at me.

David Stanhope died from a heroin overdose. He vomited face up and so sedated as to not notice the fact. Carter Stanhope was shot by a police officer as he tried to rake at the man’s eyes. He had been filled with a mixture of PCP and methamphetamine at the time. Marshall Stanhope was stabbed to death in this house’s kitchen. He and a tiny woman, whose brain was more meth than grey matter, were fighting over a package of frozen waffles, and when he wrenched it from her hands, she grabbed a steak knife and went to work. The house was raided not long after by teams of men with guns and gas grenades and hard black boots. We walls stood by and watched men and women taken by them or shot by them when they attempted to resist or gave their own violence back to the usurping men. We, too, were shot and filled with the stench of tear gas and pepper spray and gun smoke. If only those men had come weeks earlier. They might have been able to take my little girl in before she drew that glass along her arms. They might have been able to save her.

And now I stand, below ceilings and above floors and next to walls. I am but one of them. They have seen and heard and felt what I have. And I see you, you who stands before me and sees what has been made of me. You see what I was and what I am now, what Eva and her brothers and her parents were and what they could have been. Where a little girl once stroked my petals and looked upon me and wished for purpose and answers to the questions, now I am riddled with bullet holes. I have been kicked and beaten. I am stained with old blood, crimson gone black. My clouds are yellow with smoke. My flowers are black with death. My sun is dull now. And it will never shine again. Yet I stand and continue to see and to hear, though now it is naught but still air and old horrors that whisper to me.

The humans forget, or they die. But we walls stand and are left…

…to weather the storm.