I suppose dark things were destined to happen in the northwestern-most corner of the northwestern-most room. Though painted a springy shade of “frolic,” my living quarters were more of a dying quarters — for the bees and moths encrusting my windowsill, anyway. I spent so little time in my insect necropolis that I didn’t notice my surviving residents until I found their plunder in my bookshelf.
Somehow, though, I wasn’t surprised when I pulled my purple binder off the shelf and a torrent of dog food poured into my lap. I’d been hearing claw-tipped footsteps inside the walls for weeks, and now I understood where they were skittering with such determination. I enjoyed their company, enjoyed knowing they were smarter than my dad’s glue traps, enjoyed imagining cartoon pawprints stamping their way from the slatted pine ceiling to the buckling flagstone floor and through the ever-expanding crack in the northwest corner of my room.
At first, I kept the crack a secret. I was delighted to learn that our house had no foundation and my room was slowly sliding downhill. I kept an eager eye on the adjacent corner, but it never even developed a hairline crack, just a large stash of kibble.
All the same, I never stopped hoping that my room would burst its drywall seams and skid through rivers of rocky red mud on its full-throttle voyage to anywhere but here. At seventeen, I still refused to let go of the distant kingdom where I, the lost dragon princess, would someday reclaim my throne. It was not just around the riverbend. It was not somewhere over the rainbow. It was somewhere that could only be reached by a severed bedroom with lots of downhill momentum.
My bedroom wasn’t even a bedroom. It was too small for a bed. It was, come to think of it, only slightly longer and deeper than a sarcophagus.
My room was a museum of dark whimsy, a marble cake of my bleakest and brightest moments. If it happened to grind to a halt in the neighboring Baptist Center, the good, God-fearing Christians would be aghast to see that spiders had died in the webs they’d woven around my painting of naked angels. They’d be alarmed by the papier-mâché replica of The Tower tarot card hanging beneath my shelf of “cowie banks.” If they glanced at my bookshelves and saw my Bunny Suicides collection next to My Little Pony Round and Round, they’d be too upset to pray.
Wherever I washed up, I’d take the mice with me. They’d worked so hard collecting corn-and-wheat-free dog food, they deserved to munch their spoils while my room bobbed downriver into the Pecos wilderness. They’d have to respect my space, though. This was no luxury liner. And they’d have to respect my stuff. Stuffed animals, that is. I’d never had much luck with human friends, but at least I had Sick Puppy, Baby Earmuff, Princess Louie, Madame Claire, General Collie, and various bunnies and ponies named Pink Rose.
I was good with animals. I knew we’d get along, the mice and I. Unless, of course, my dad tromped in with his caulking gun and my mom swept in with her broom until nothing remained of my dreams but a puffy white scar in the corner and a lone chicken-flavored pellet that had avoided the dustpan.
