Walking Houses
by Matt Briggs
"Beasts live in the forest," Oliver said. "They come into our world to hide amongst us in disguise. These animals look exactly like houses, peaked roofs, shingles, eaves, porches, mother-in-law apartments, all of it. These beasts maneuver out of the trees and plant down beside the road, looking for all the world like a fixer-upper, cheap, you know, but it's just a show so that people will come to live in them, not knowing.
"Suddenly, the house beast gets a hair up its ass, and sets out, just taking off with all the peoples' stuff crammed in its guts. The beast rips out of its foundation, unhooks the electrical wires, jerks out the pipes and crawls back into the forest, dumping out the furniture, the family portraits, the family heirloom grand piano. I'm sure you've seen a place where a house like this has been. In that gaping foundation, one of these beasts has lived, listening to the people go about their daily business. These people were unaware that every word they said was being heard, and would ultimately be used by this beast. But that's what it fed on. It lived off the captive family's words. It would get a little indigestion after a bad joke, get stuffed and a little drunk after a bullshit card-game with the cronies. When it came down to it, the beast really liked an argument. It filled the house with its hostile breath, the vapors altering the mood of the people inside, raising their blood pressure, making them pissed. Really utterly mad. They started with bickering at breakfast, carried over from a night of insomnia, tossing and turning because they were already peeved at something somebody had said during the day, you know, 'John, would you please brush your teeth after you eat an onion sandwich?' John lays in bed, having spent thirty minutes brushing his teeth. Morning, John gets up and throws the milk at his wife. 'You smell like milk, Bitch.' You get the picture. And a murdered family, one that just gets nuts and kills itself is a real bonus to the beast. Every beast that's been around has scored a family murder. The men start to drip frothy red bubbles out of their nostrils and they butcher their sleeping wives and carve the hearts out of their children and in horror at their own brutality, they cut out their shit-filled innards.
"I've lived to tell about seeing one of these monsters moving. In the dark trees by the Raging River, one night coming back from a late day fishing upstream toward Preston, in the pale blue dusk, I saw a house walking upright, through a stand of old cedars. A yellow light spilled out of the windows. Bare floors tilted in the forward stride of the long sumo-wrestler legs. Its toes pressed into the damp earth. Naked light bulbs swayed inside the empty rooms. It was a vacant two-room house-beast. The building didn't make much noise. I could hear, as if nothing was happening, a distant airplane, the rush of water over stones in the river, the rattling of a car on the Preston-Fall City Road. I lay in the cover of the sword ferns, their spiny leaves tickling my face, drifting spores up my nose. I had to sneeze. But, if I sneezed, I'd get a two-yard-long sumo wrestler foot planted on my face. A heavy creak of wood resonated through the forest. The house lowered its roof line under a cedar tree's drooping branches and was gone. I sneezed and got the hell out of there.
"I recalled the time your Dad and I returned home when we were kids, and where our house had been, an empty foundation stood. Our sister, Joyce, sat crying in the driveway. 'My record player was in there,' she said. It had been. But, everything was gone. Our house had been one of these monsters and had just picked up and left with all our stuff in its guts."
"Where do these creatures come from?" I asked. Oliver held me onto the bed. Jake snored in the bottom bunk.
"Gigantic... prehistoric... flightless... birds. They evolved. They had to. At first, they just sort of looked like houses, and no one lived in them. But The FBSS, Flightless Bird Slaying Society, found them out. They had to become trickier to survive, breed, mature, mutate, and breed again."
"Houses don't have sex."
"True. However, my friend, birds do."
"No, they don't."
"And why not? Wouldn't you have sex if you had the chance? Hell yes you would. Birds got to have sex. Where do you think they come from? New Fucking Jersey?"
"How can you tell if it's a house?"
"Centuries of fucking evolution have made that impossible. Literally. Evolution. Survival of the best damned fuckers. Hence, the need for there to be sex and lots of it. The ones that could be detected have been killed by the FBSS. It is a moot point these days. Nobody can tell."
I was ten years old and full of moot questions.
Matt Briggs [http://www.seedcake.com/mattbriggs/] is the author of The Remains of River Names, published by Black Heron Press. Recent stories have appeared in The Raven Chronicles, The North Dakota Review, Stringtown, and Chrysanthemum. A book of short stories is forthcoming from Stringtown (2002), and a novel (2003). He lives in Seattle with his wife and daughter.