I could show you a photo, but it wouldn’t tell you about the green, sick smell of the rotted glue of the peeling wallpaper, black mold dappled across it like a swampy Pollock painting. I could shove your nose into the corpse of my mother’s fur coat in the closet, but it wouldn’t tell you about the horror of seeing the ribbons of animal pelt hanging piecemeal from the hanger like a river otter had been flayed to inflict the greatest suffering. Out on the brown and ruined grass of the front yard, I could have you walk a slow circle around the pile of interior-now-exterior broken furniture/soggy clothes/washed-empty photo albums/cracked-open TVs/children’s crayon pictures smeared brown with river mud/warped rare LPs/swollen boxes of cereal/lipsticks with fuzzy caps of mildew/twisted bikes pulled from the tree in the backyard/Kiddush cup used by your great-great-grandfather the rabbi /your little brother’s collection of Pokemon cards/every photograph of you and your siblings growing up that your mother ever took/bags of pale bloated nuggets of dog food that have burst their paper containers/sauté pans filthy with chemicals that swirled in the water and blister your hands if you touch them without the yellow dishwashing gloves you must use to sort through all the shit that was once the scaffolding of our lives, things that kept our memories, our schedules, our bellies full. But that still wouldn’t make you feel the danger of cutting yourself on bacteria-covered nails, chemical-soaked splintered wood, fiberglass threads. Wouldn’t make you turn, gagging, puking, from the refrigerator when you couldn’t help yourself from opening its door as it leaned crazily on that growing, growing pile. Yours, one of tens of thousands of houses vomiting their interiors, each door with a cross-hatched red circle of testimony on it, telling us who was left behind to tell the story.
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