CW: death, animal death, and unhealthy relationships.
In the morning room everything is bright and clean, florals and pastels. My wife says it looks tacky and childish, but after some pleading, she agrees not to touch the decorations. The faint lavender-colored walls I hang with dried pressed flowers in clear-plastic frames. The couch is the most expensive thing I ever bought, the cushions embroidered with pink silk chrysanthemums. No one is allowed to eat on the couch. The rug is hand-tied, white with pink and black abstract decorations, big enough to cover the old trapdoor in the floorboards.
When we moved in, the morning room was the darkest room in the house, facing the northeast and painted dark green. The walls seemed to close in on you, pushing you toward the trapdoor and down into the darkness. Of course we went through the trapdoor and it was only an empty cellar, but sometimes in the morning room I remember that we’re sitting over a chasm, perched over the dust and dark on a platform of century-old boards. So to combat this precarity the room must be bright and lovely. It must capture the light in the early hours and soak it up and always feel like dawn.
My wife likes to read there alone in the mornings. By the time I have my coffee and wander into the morning room in my slippers, she is already there, stretched out on the carpet with a mug of tea beside her and a book in her hands. One morning she’s reading a book about exponential growth. To me it sounds excruciating, but she’s a mathematician and hates reading fiction. I ask her why she reads on the floor and she tells me it’s because my couch is so uncomfortable. I sit on the couch and take my slippers off and place my feet gently on her back while she reads and press my toes softly into the spaces between her ribs. Stop that, she says, just let me read in peace for once.
When she gets up and goes to work I clean up the house and sit down at my desk to write. My office space is dark in comparison to the morning room—it’s painted gray and the walls are hung with paintings that inspire me to write. But often, when I am alone in the house, I move to the morning room with my laptop and sit on the couch, and secretly set my coffee on its tall back.
In the morning room you can feel the house breathing. Old houses have these charming little creaks that have no point of origin. You can look all night for what is making the noise and find nothing, and in the end it’s just the house, so old that it’s practically part of the earth now and groans and sways as the earth turns. During the first weeks in the house I am obsessed with a fluttering noise that I only notice when I put my head on my pillow at night. I look in every room, crawl around with my ear to the floorboards, even have my wife take a broom and go into the attic to look for bats. I never find the source of the noise, and my wife tells me I’m probably imagining things and to just forget about it. You’re so high strung, she says, just chill the fuck out. I learn to sleep with the noise eventually, and then after a while I find it comforting, and when I’m away I can’t fall asleep without it.
I hear it in the morning room sometimes, a delicate little fluttering, like paper caught in a vent. If I’m tired enough I fall asleep to it and my wife comes home and finds me on the couch, dozing. Right where I left you, she says one evening, after I cleaned the house, wrote a whole chapter. Nice to know I’m the only one who works around here. I don’t bother to correct her. I am too tired to argue.
At some point my wife starts messing with the morning room rug. Every day for weeks after she leaves for work I find it crooked and straighten it. Honey can you please set the rug right after you read there, I ask her, it’s always crooked from you lying on it. She never does. Without fail, when she leaves for work it is folded under, or crumpled with creases, and I have to wrestle with it and the couch to get it straight. It is a small thing on its own, but it frustrates me. She is bigger than me, and it would be a small effort for her to put the rug right before she goes to work, but instead she leaves it to me, along with the dishes, the cooking, the cleaning, until she comes home late from work and finds something about me to criticize.
One morning I can’t sleep very well and hear her get up before me, make her tea, and leave the kettle whistling while she thumps and thuds around with something. I get up, take the kettle off the stove and follow her into the morning room. I find her, coming up out of the trapdoor, the rug cast to one side, and by the time I am in the room she is gently letting the trapdoor down into the floor.
“What were you doing down there,” I ask her.
“Just putting a few old boxes in storage,” she tells me. “It’s nice that we have a basement to store things.”
“What are you storing?”
“Just my old stuff. Books and stuff from when I was a kid.”
I don’t care about my wife’s old stuff, and I hate the thought of the dark empty space beneath my morning room, so I do not go to look.
The next day when I wake up the whole house smells ancient. Old library paper, old basement, the bathroom in a nursing home, a bag of forgotten potatoes, a wet rag left in the laundry bag, mildew and dust and age. The fluttering of the house is louder than ever before and my wife is gone, her half of the bed already cold. I get up naked to go and find her, running through rooms to hidden corners, avoiding the windows so the neighbors don’t see my body. When I get downstairs, the morning room is empty and the trapdoor is open, rug in a crumpled heap. I call her name but there is no answer. The fluttering sound is the loudest yet, a thousand moths trying to escape a lampshade.
In the beautiful sunlit morning room the black gape of the trapdoor is a portal. Inside it I see only the wooden ladder, coarse-hewn and covered in cobwebs, descending into the dust. I find my wife’s phone on the couch and light the flashlight, and climb naked and barefoot into the dark. My feet touch the dusty earth, and the dust is thick as carpet between my toes. The smell in the basement is overpowering: must, rust, old and broken and decayed, rotting and buried and not to be dug up. The basement room is the same size as the morning room above, the floor either made of dirt or so covered with dust as to feel like dirt. I shine my light slowly around the room, but there are no boxes, no storage, none of my wife’s old things.
The cellar room contains instead an arrangement of dead animals in a circle around the ladder. A maggotty opossum lies at twelve o’clock, then a desiccated rat, a rotting cat, a mostly decomposed raccoon. The rest in the circle are too far gone for me to tell what they had been, the last few are only skeletons. Ten in total, arranged around me. I breathe in through my nose and start to heave. Did my wife do this? In the mornings before I awaken, does she come down here to leave these offerings to rot? I cling to the ladder with one arm like the mast of a ship. I do not leave the square of light left by the trapdoor hole, I do not let even my smallest toe cross the threshold of light into the dark and death of the cellar. I shut my eyes tight and crawl naked back up the ladder, close the trapdoor and kick the rug over it haphazardly. I return to the bedroom and get in the shower, scrubbing the haunted dust from my body. Later, in the morning room, I notice my bare footprints on the rug, colorless smudges of the dust from the basement floor.
My wife comes in a few hours later with the groceries. I am waiting for her on the couch in the morning room, leaving the trapdoor between us.
“What were you doing in the basement room?”
“What? I was out shopping.”
“You left your phone in here.”
“Thanks, I was looking for that.”
“There are dead animals in the basement. Rats and cats and God-knows-what-else.”
She looks disgusted. “What are you talking about? Is something living down there?”
“You were down there. The trapdoor was open.”
“I haven’t been here for hours. I was out shopping. Maybe you should try leaving the house, for once. You sound like you’re going crazy.”
“I’m telling you,” tears are forming at the corners of my eyes, “the trapdoor was open and there were dead animals down there. I saw them.” Doubt opens beneath my resolve, the world unmakes itself as the words leave my mouth and is reconstructed in a new reality, aligned to her, hostile to me.
“There’s no way. Do you want me to look in there?”
“No. I never want us to open the trapdoor again.”
“Don’t be silly, it’s just a basement.”
My wife kicks back the rug and opens the trapdoor, me cowering behind her. We both squat around the hole, she shines her phone light down into it and I see only dust. There is no sign of the rotting animals that had been there hours before. She always does this, I think to myself, she’s always right and I always end up being wrong. I want to cry but I know she will tell me I’m being dramatic.
“I don’t see anything, but it does smell bad in there,” she says. “I won’t put any more stuff down there. And you need to get out more,” she turns to me, disdain in her eyes, and I am crumbling, “you’re really starting to sound nuts.”
• • • •
For weeks afterward, I wake when she does and lie in bed, listening for her to lift the trapdoor of the morning room, but she never does. I scrub the dust footprints out of the carpet, light scented candles all over the house. There is something about my morning room now that I do not like and cannot place. The pastels seem cheap, the dried pressed flowers feel like a funeral home. Tacky, childish, just like she said. I take all of them down and buy a painting instead, one thick stroke of black ink calligraphy on a cream canvas, and hang it on the largest wall across from the couch. I like staring at it while I write in the morning room. Now the darkest spot in the room is something I can see, a flat black line instead of a hole beneath my feet. I try to forget about the trapdoor, the chasm, the dead animals that are there and not-there.
After two months pass, I convince myself that I imagined the dead animals out of fright. My wife left the door open when she’d gone out shopping and in my fear of the basement I made the shadows into little horrors. I try to be cheery, to stifle the old arguments that lie in wait under my tongue. My wife avoids me as much as she did before, except now with suspicious glances from the corner of her eye. She comes home even later, now, when I’ve already given up hope and put dinner away. I don’t say anything. She thinks I am losing it, cooped up in the house, doing nothing, seeing ghosts in the basement, hearing flutters in my pillow at night. You need a life, she says to me in bed, turned toward the wall. You wouldn’t have time to think about this stuff if you had something going for yourself. I curl up to her back, put my arm around her. You’re too hot, she says. I can’t sleep with you close to me.
We celebrate New Year’s in the morning room with our friends, drinking champagne and eating cherries soaked in rum and little water chestnuts wrapped in bacon. When everyone leaves at three in the morning she corners me on the couch and we kiss, drunkenly, our mouths tasting sour. She takes my breasts out of the top of my dress and sucks them, clumsily rubs me through my dress and tights and underwear so I feel nothing. She is sloppy and her breath is too hot, I am too hot, and I am sweating on the expensive couch, so I tell her to wait a minute and we climb down onto the floor, onto the carpet, and she gets naked, tall and drunk and looming over me, unsmiling. I peel my tights and damp underwear off and she pushes me down and pulls my legs in toward her and starts licking me on that rug. It itches my body everywhere my skin touches it, and I can feel my wife’s wet, sticky lips on me, lapping, and I writhe and moan a little, theatrically, but mostly I’m wriggling to relieve my legs and buttocks for a moment of the feeling of the itchy woolen rug. She gives up her licking after only a few minutes and puts her two fingers into me, pushing up on a spot that almost hurts but not quite, and even though I’m not in the mood I can’t help but clench up when she starts to work her arm inside me, hard, and she drunkenly mutters something filthy to me but my head is back now, looking at the painting, at the black hole in the cream canvas, and thinking of the holes in us.
When I come, she crawls back up to my face and her lips are wet and her breath smells of rot, morning breath, and her teeth scrape on mine when she kisses me. I start to kiss her neck, kiss down her naked body, and she grabs my hair and pushes me down toward her crotch. I begin doing what I know she likes, and her fingers are tight on my scalp at first, but after a while I feel them slacken and her legs go limp. Her breath deepens and I raise my head to see that she is snoring. She’s disgusting, lying there like that. She’s naked on the carpet with her legs rudely open and one knee off to the side. I look down at her, exposed, and underneath her lies the rug, and beneath it the trapdoor, and then the ladder, and the rotting basement. I leave her there on the rug and go to our bedroom and lay in bed, the room spinning slightly, and after a while I fall asleep to the house fluttering.
The next morning I wake up hungover. Everything smells terrible to me—my lavender hand soap makes me feel sick, the scent of my coffee brewing is sour and foul. I look in the morning room and my wife is no longer asleep on the rug. Our clothes are still there, and the room is full of empty champagne bottles that made me sick to look at, so I turn away. I make a huge breakfast of eggs and cheese, choke it down on a sour stomach and feel better almost instantly.
After sleeping for a few more hours, I go looking for my wife. She is nowhere to be found in the house, nor is her phone, and when I call she doesn’t answer. I go into the morning room to clear away the empty bottles and notice for the first time a large stain on the couch, a brown stain splashed over the flowers. I am already feeling delicate from the alcohol and I start to cry, thinking of the expense and the ruined couch, which I have only had for a year. I sniff the stain and can’t place it, but I think of my wife and her tea and I blame her. I can see what happened, she woke up and had her tea in the morning room and spilled it on the couch, and then, in her embarrassment, she left, and now I am alone here with everything she ruined, the party mess and the dirty clothes and the stained couch and the world that wasn’t quite right anymore. I lie on the rug, crying, looking at the party debris of crumpled cocktail napkins and toothpicks and leftover glasses and my tights and my wife’s clothes. From beneath me I hear a fluttering sound, louder than usual, that sounds very much like a bird trapped in the basement. I wipe my eyes on a soiled cocktail napkin and get up.
I tug and drag the woolen rug aside to expose the trapdoor. It is made of wood planks that do not align to the rest of the floorboards by a quarter-inch, and at one end is a circular pull that is recessed in a board. I heave at the metal ring and open the thing. You would expect an old trapdoor to creak, but it is perfectly silent and smooth, as if oiled. Either from the sudden motion or from the wash of warm, stale air, my nausea returns. The scent that comes out of the trapdoor in the floor is earthen and rotten. The fluttering is louder, but nothing emerges. I do not want to go down into the darkness, so I crouch at the edge of the hole and shine my phone’s flashlight into the corners from above, in the morning room. Behind the ladder I see something bulky and indistinct, a shadow in the corner of the room, but try as I might, I cannot make out what it is.
My bare foot touches down on the ladder and it feels like clammy fabric. I recoil and look closely at the ladder for the first time, and see that it’s covered in a layer of thin white fuzz, translucent above the shaggy grain of the wood. Dry rot, I guess. It would explain the smell. I put my weight on the ladder hesitantly, no longer trusting the rotting structure to support me, but it holds as I lower myself into the chasm below the morning room. When I reach the bottom, I hold my light up to the wood around the ladder, and I can see slim, furry veins of white dry rot radiating in all directions from the hole of the trapdoor, thinner in the middle and as thick as felt around the edges of the circle, eating the floor from under our feet in the morning room. I feel as if the air were a spore cloud. The light from the ladder above shines on the motes of dust, heavy and large as snowflakes in the air. I don’t breathe.
I lower the light from the ladder to see the bundle behind it. It’s the same carpet from the morning room—the one my wife lies on, the one I kicked aside to open the trapdoor. It looks like it has been here for ages, wrapped and rolled and layered in dust on the floor. I approach it and kick it, and feel it rock back and forth under its heavy weight. With one bare foot I roll it toward me and it unwraps, first one layer, then another, until at last a body rolls out. The body is naked, limp and heavy, and I recognize the back of my wife’s head, her dark hair damp and matted. She is twisted so that her face and shoulders face the floor and her hips face upward. I turn her over with my foot and see that her cheeks have shrunken into her blotchy face from weeks underground, she looks almost unrecognizable except that she is staring at me with the same cold disgust as she does when she gets home late and finds me sleeping in the morning room.
“What have you been doing down here,” I asked her. “You can’t tell me you were just out shopping. I know you’ve been here this whole time.”
She has nothing to say to that. I roll her back up in the rug and go back to the ladder. I can see a pile of animal skeletons in the corner of the room, browning skulls covered in dust and cobwebs, but still no boxes, none of her old things. So, I say to myself, she lied about that, too.
I climb the ladder and close the trapdoor, ignoring the dry rot, thinking nothing of the heavy creaking of the morning room floorboards. I put the carpet back, this time careful not to touch it with my filthy feet. It’s the same as ever, pink and black and free of dust, thick and itchy, my wife’s blouse from the New Year’s party is still stuck to it with static. I leave to shower and when I return to the morning room the purple light of the setting sun through the windows nearly matches the color of the paint, faintest violet. Flies buzz above the trapdoor, fluttering comfortingly against the ceiling and walls. I scrub my dusty footprints from the floor, clear away the cups and champagne bottles. I put salt on the stain on the couch and dab it away with cold water. After a few minutes of delicate scrubbing, the couch looks good as new. I straighten the rug, light a vanilla candle to fight the smell of the dry rot.
The room looks so bright, so calming, in the purple sunset of the wintertime. The morning room is beautiful light and peace, it has soaked in the dawn and the world is back to normal, as if there had never been a trapdoor, or a cellar. I lie on the couch, listening to the delicate fluttering of the flies on the ceiling, and fall asleep.
