MOSAIC

Chapter 3: The House

I emerged from the car. Cold rain drizzled down from a mottled grey sky, the heavy clouds suffocating the evening sun's rays with their gloomy density. The world was colourless and pale. I looked east towards the city's downtown core and observed the distant looming silhouettes of skyscrapers through an endless wall of misty rain. The most prominent of the towers protruded triumphantly out from the hazy spray like a spear, its spire disappearing into the murky sky. Only the blurry lights of its peak were visible as they faintly flashed somewhere up in the atmosphere.

The more I stood there leaning against the car observing it through the rain, the more I had the perception that the rainfall was not even coming from the sky, but that the entire city was being enveloped in some sort of writhing oceanic fog, its pin-like water droplets flowing rampantly through the air in all directions. I could feel a brisk dampness beginning to coil itself throughout my body, and it spurred me to get moving.

I had to weave my way through a network of hastily parked cars, bumpers inches from one another. Their driveway was always crammed with at least five or six vehicles, even midweek during the day, and they weren't always the same cars. I've only been to the house a couple of times, and it's always been a different gathering of vehicles cluttering the driveway each time, especially on weekends when the automobile carnage would spill out onto the street. I could only recognize one of the cars without issue, a murder-black Hellcat pushed up all the way near the front porch of the house, one of its wide wheels straddling the unkempt front lawn.

The house itself was situated in a century old neighbourhood, nestled in the outer-midst of the city's core. Colossal oaks and maple trees canopied the streets like ancient and unmoving guardians, magnificent in stature, their countless years of silent wisdom etched and carved into the thick bark of their trunks. The house was a grand old Victorian, around a hundred years old or so if I had to guess. Maybe even older. Generations upon generations of eras and past lives were seared into these old areas of the city. Endless character and history.

I always enjoy observing a particularly old house and thinking about its past inhabitants going about their daily business and living out moments of their lives way back in the distant past. Many of the old wooden porches at the entryways of these homes bear the footmarks of thousands of bad and good days coming home from work, or the entire school-life of a child from a toddler to an adult. I like to think about the story and life behind every little scuff, mark or scratch I see sometimes. It's as though a small piece of whatever was happening in someone's life is still cryptically echoing into the present, decades after it happened.

The longstanding porch's front steps creaked with each footfall as I entered beneath the cavernous brick archway that walled the front entrance to the house like a big open-mouthed cave. There was a sizeable crack in one of the aging bricks, a solid chunk smashed clean out, probably long ago by the looks of it. I gazed down at it and began to ponder.

It reminded me of a similar missing chunk of wall I'd seen on a house many years ago as a small child. It was the home of a cranky old bastard who we the neighbourhood menaces used to enjoy playing pranks on. I would frequent his porch as a little boy to ring his bell and then run away. I recall seeing him returning home from work one summer afternoon, carrying himself heavily up those same wooden steps I would dash off of after hammering his doorbell. His head was hung low, and I remember thinking about how exceptionally ancient and elderly he looked even though at the time he was a man likely only in his late fifties or early sixties. He looked particularly tired, sullen, and old on this particular day the way he creaked himself up those steps. I didn't know it at that time, but on this particular day the man had been fired from his job, another knife in his stooped, aching back. Still brooding and bitter, he was unable to enter his house, perhaps out of refusal to enclose himself in a confined space, despite it being a large and rather splendid house. From my driveway in my favourite sandals, bouncing a basketball up and down, I watched as he smoked cigarette after cigarette, willing him to head in for the day so I could ring his bell and run away, gleefully giggling with delight at my mischief. I vividly remember how he stood up, snatched one of the metal chairs resting on his porch and cracked it against the wall, taking a generous chunk out of one particular brick. He retired to his home immediately after that, hostile and bitter, muttering curse words I still hadn't learned. I chose not to play my little game on his doorbell that day, and played with my basketball instead. The unpleasant atmosphere of the day eventually faded away, as did the man, but the crack in the brick remained, and for years later, every time I saw that crack in the brick on that house I'd replay that story in my head, briefly transporting back to my driveway in my sandals, bouncing my basketball, watching him slam that chair into the wall. Same story, but I always seem to have so many different angles to play it from as I've grown up.