“The Move Out from Marbury Drive,” Shiv Majmudar

Today on Midwest Weird: “The Move Out from Marbury Drive,” by Shiv Majmudar.

Shiv Majmudar has published fiction in the Alabama Literary Review. His stories have been recognized by the Writers of the Future Contest. A senior at Olentangy Orange High School, he lives in Westerville, Ohio.

Midwest Weird is an audio literary magazine from Broads and Books Productions. We’re the home of weird fiction and nonfiction by Midwestern writers.

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Episode Transcript:

This is Midwest Weird, an audio literary magazine from Broads and Books Productions.

We’re the home of weird fiction and nonfiction by Midwestern writers.

Today’s episode: “The Move Out from Marbury Drive,” by Shiv Majmudar. Read by the Midwest Weird team.

I will tell you what I saw last time I visited my parents’ house, but you must promise me one thing first. Don’t ever say I’m lying to you. If you’re afraid of being lied to, I can assure you that you won’t find that here. Your loved ones, your friends, your family – these people lie to you more than I ever would. You lie to others more than you’d like to admit. You lie to yourself as well. But I didn’t write to lie. Don’t ever accuse me of not telling the truth. Because your life contains more deceit than these pages, and it’s not even close.

Okay, we’ve got that out of the way. I’m not lying to you. Good? But before we move forward, let’s clear up something else. I’m not trying to scare you. If you read on, you may think I am, but I swear on my life that I’m not. Again, I’m not trying to scare you. I’m trying to tell the truth.

Anyways, back to my parents’ house. My childhood home on Marbury Drive. It was the third time after I went back after my mom died. She had breast cancer. They gave her enough morphine and sedatives to calm down a whole ward of women, but needless to say she went out relatively painlessly. She had come from India in the 80s after marrying my father. She raised me while being a doctor. My mother was a feel-good immigrant story turned into a person. Which is to say that when I visited their house for the last time, I hadn’t expected to come out questioning my sanity.

Again, I’m not lying to you. Perhaps the more I say it, the more dishonest I come across. There’s nothing louder than someone trying not to make a sound. But I would never lie to you. Your own friends have told you more lies than I have so far. Have you ever tried to trust someone? It’s a dangerous business, like standing on a frozen lake in the dead of winter. Either the ice holds up or it doesn’t. Your fate depends on it.

My mother died on the 3rd of September. It had been coming for a long time, so I had done my best to brace for it. It was hardly a shock. I was down at a CVS searching for protein bars and ear plugs when the phone rang. It was my sister’s turn to hold watch over at the hospital, and she informed me in a soft, broken voice that mom was dead. By the time I arrived, the family had placed holy water on her lips, and someone was coming to take care of the body.

Another truth: I did not cry. I had done my crying beforehand, on quiet afternoons at our suburban Cleveland home. My father was still alive, but weak and frail. My sister’s family took him in. I have an apartment to myself near Chicago, with no wife or children to speak of. But I had relocated to Northeast Ohio for the time being, mainly because it was part of my responsibility to prepare the house for sale. That involved taking out all the dusty furniture and old wedding cassette tapes, heavy suitcases that went on India trips every winter, and the rest of the ancient stuff that made you feel hollow and wistful inside. I stripped my old room bare, taking down the shelves with biology textbooks from high school, old track medals, my box of baseball cards and the rest. I rolled up my tattered Kobe Bryant poster and put it with the rest of the keepsakes. Kobe was dead, along with this house. To say this was a depressing task was an understatement. Visiting this house was like visiting a grave.

Still no lies. I haven’t got to the strange part yet but notice that. No lies yet.

It was late September. Two and a half weeks after my mother died, I was in the house again. It wasn’t my choice. I never wanted to be in that house. It’s my childhood home, but life has gone out of it. Ever since mom got sick, every visit to our old house is against my will. After nearly four decades, a lot of junk can accumulate in a small space. Ours was a fair-sized, middle-class home. A good area with good schools and good lawns and good neighbors. I kept the curtains drawn.

I wanted to hire someone to haul everything away, but that was against my father’s wishes. There are valuable things in there, he said. Things that mean a lot to me. Promise me you’ll look through it and find things to keep.

It was out of my power to object. He was in grief like the rest of us, and if the way he coped was by saving every last photo of my mom in that old house, so be it. I took out dusty photo albums and our rotary phone. I scavenged the house for every goddamn antique I could get my hands on. It was the least I could do. My sister was the one taking in my father for the rest of his life, and I had been out in Chicago for most of mom’s illness. I had even been absent from the room when she died. I’d lie and tell you I wasn’t there for a lot of it because of work, but that wasn’t true. I stayed in Chicago because coming back was like ducking into a room full of smoke. Being as far away as possible for my dying mother was the only way to get a breath of fresh air. And since I’ve sworn not to lie to you, I’ll add one more thing. When she died, I was not at CVS to get anything I needed. I had plenty of proteins bars in my overnight bag. I left to escape the heavy dark fog that obscured everything in that hospital room. I left because being with my mom was suffocating. I left to breathe again. It sounds selfish, but that’s the truth.

My sister was there when she died. She’s taken the responsibility of caring for my father, and that’s not the only duty she’s fulfilled. She became a doctor, married Indian, had babies, and was everything my parents could’ve wished for. A child who tolerated the heavy, cloying smoke of sadness. A child who shouldered her responsibilities like an adult. Me? I was single, currently unemployed, and childless. It was fair that I helped with something. So I went into our dead house without complaint.

It was a warm, sunny afternoon. I pulled my car into the driveway and sighed. Two weeks of rummaging can do a number on your soul. The garage had four boxes in it. Two were for junk, and two were for keepsakes. The junk ones were quite full – by the time I was done with this slow, torturous process, we’d need a third. The keepsake boxes were photo albums and lamps, my mother’s old saris and my sister’s high school yearbook. I’ll be honest and confide in you that I didn’t see a need to keep any of it. These were just objects, made of plastic or paper. I didn’t care what my family saw in them. They were empty, soulless artifacts to me. It sounds heartless, but I told you I don’t write to lie.

I punched the code in the garage, and it rattled open. Cobwebs adorned the hinges and corners of the dusty place that had once housed our Honda Civic. Various gardening items that had belonged to my mother sat muddy and unattended on the shelves. Ant and wasp killer, weed spray, bug repellent and so on. The lawnmower wore a garland of cobwebs and hadn’t been used since my father’s knee got messed up a few years back. The trashcan stood right by the mower, the city emblem on its side. We had blue trashcans. I hadn’t remembered until now.

On a wooden shelf to the left of the garage was the sporting equipment. Very little of this had been used in the past decade since I moved out, and my sister’s children aren’t old enough to play with these things yet. A dusty frisbee with a Zyrtec label sat glumly next to a basketball. My basketball, I thought, from the days when I thought I had a chance of going pro. How old was I then? Ten? Eleven? A short, skinny brown kid with subpar shooting form, practicing on a driveway hoop that had since been sold. I picked up the ball and tried to dribble. It was flat, socking against the floor with a hollow flunk. It left a fine layer of cobwebs on my hands. My basketball had no life left in it. How many other things were lost?

Next to the basketball was an unopened can of tennis balls, and near the lawnmower on the other side of the garage were a few tennis rackets. My sister played tennis in high school. We were moved from those days against our will. My mom in the kitchen, fussing over a pot of dal while my sister and I hunched over books at the table. A small family of four living the American Dream. Time had plucked us from that place and put us into this new, unfamiliar world. Mom was dead. And this house was a shitty, cobwebby old place that no one wanted to buy.

I entered the house from the garage. I took my shoes off based on habit. Only a stranger would walk in this house without going barefoot. My socks grew black with dust. I walked across our old living room, treading carefully on the atrocious brown carpet that we had never bothered to change. The place was barren. Most of the desolation was my doing. The pictures were gone. Our living room had a swing that was bolted into the wall. The small pillows on each end were gone, but the rest of it was intact. Whoever wanted to buy this house – if someone did want it – would be gifted with a piece of fine Indic wood carving.

Of course, no one had sat on the swing in quite some time. In the past, we had. Guests loved it. My father used to rock me to sleep on it when I was young. But it had lived enough. It was another dusty piece of furniture suspended on creaky hinges. But since there was no other place to sit, I used it. All the couches had been moved out a week ago. Same with all the chairs and the beds. The house was a bit stuffy because we no longer ran the AC. And without my mother, the place hadn’t been cleaned in about three months. Clouds of dust hovered over every surface like a swarm of mosquitoes.

Another truth, before we go further. I already wanted to leave. Maybe it was the heat or the dust or just the overall decay of the place, but I wanted out. It was as if the room was full of toxic fumes. I wanted to breathe in the crisp fall air and leave my old house to crumble in the dust. But I had run away from my family before, and I wasn’t going to do it again. Hadn’t I been outdoors for my whole life? I had to do my time behind bars, too. That was called being dutiful.

I went upstairs. Ahead of me were three doors. One led to the master bedroom, which had belonged to my parents. The other was my sister’s. My humble abode was next door. I clutched the golden knob (which had since developed patches of gray where the paint flaked off) and went inside.

My room. Completely bare, it looked a lot more spacious than it had when I was younger. The desk which I had done my schoolwork on was now at some Cleveland junkyard, and the rusty Transformers that I don’t remember the names of were at my sister’s house. There was just the bed. A bare mattress lay on it. The faux gold bedframe (also flaking away) supported its grimy weight. My bedside table was gone. My closet was half-open, forgotten and bare. It had a folding door. I opened it. . . and found cobwebs and dust. My old clothes were long gone. The air inside was cold and stale and smelled of rotting wood. Had my mother been buried, this is what her coffin would have smelled like. But her wish was to be consumed by fire. I didn’t know which unsettled me more.

The junk haulers would be here tomorrow to pick up the things that were too heavy for one guy. The beds, namely, and the couches in the garage. A friend of mine named Patrick Martin had offered to help. He lived down the street, and I used to go over to his place to play Nintendo. He helped me haul the couches into the garage and a few other things before I sent him away. Thanks man, but I’ve got it, I told him, wishing silently for him to go. He offered me a beer and a pizza dinner at his place, but I refused. I wanted to be alone. Partly because I felt I deserved to be alone here. I had left my parents alone, my family alone. I had deserted them for a high-rise apartment and no kids, which I thought was the perfect lifestyle until my company let me go. Now I knew what it was like. Being alone is having no one to depend on, but also having no one to depend on you. This was the least I could do. Clean out the house, say a forgotten prayer in Sanskrit one last time in honor of my mother, and say goodbye. Which was a lot harder than anyone could imagine.

I visited my sister’s room. The walls were painted a light pink, and the bed was the only thing remaining. I wasn’t doing anything productive at this point. I peeked inside the closet and recoiled from the same dead stench. We’d be lucky if anyone bought this house. It was musty, old, and you could tell that an Indian family had lived in it. My mother’s cooking was strong and seeped into the bones and blood of this house. It wouldn’t be politically correct to refuse a house because it smelled like masala, but I knew it would go through people’s minds. Worse was the fact that the house was just plain old. It smelled like mothballs and old cooking. I wished I felt nostalgic for it. But it only made me feel empty.

By the way, I haven’t lied to you yet. Don’t ever say that I’m telling a lie. I’ve admitted that my childhood home stinks and that I don’t want anything to do with it. What’s worse to put on paper? A murder confession would be better, almost. I’m supposed to be sentimental, but I don’t feel any of that. I walked into my parents’ room and felt a tremor of unease shake my body. My father’s old recliner was here, along with the stripped bed that no one would sleep in again. The master bedroom had been by far the most cluttered, and in retrospect Patrick Martin was quite helpful. I shouldn’t have turned him down on pizza and beer. I don’t know if anyone will want to share a meal with me for a long time.

My parents kept a small shrine in the corner of the bedroom. I hadn’t touched it yet. I figured that my father would want to keep it. It was a simple thing – a laminated Durga with an ivory statue of Ganesh at its base. My mother was more religious out of the two of them. She kept this corner of the room sacred. I didn’t want to deface it. It felt crude to dump everything in a box and ship it to my father. So I let it be. Besides, I had no right to hold the Gods in my own hands. I was not theirs, and they were not mine. It was best to let some movers place the shrine in a box marked fragile and send it across the country to my sister’s home. That way my father could die with the same gods his wife had worshipped. But I didn’t deserve to take part in that journey.

Meanwhile, downstairs, there was work to be done. I fled from the master bedroom without looking back. Only a few things remained. I planned to give mom’s pots and pans to my sister. She would actually have some use for them, anyway. I never learned the art of cooking. My mother grew up in a simpler time, when women cooked for men and let them eat first. But everything she did was done with love. I took the various cookers and pans from the cupboards and divided them up among cushioned Home Depot cardboard boxes. When this task was done, I duct taped them shut and wrote on the front in black Sharpie: Mom’s Cooking Stuff. I took the boxes to the living room one by one and arranged for them to be taken to my sister. A little sweaty and out of breath, I collapsed on the swing and stared at my work.

I was thinking about how much my sister would love to have this when the knocking started.

Listen to me. You think you can sense a lie when it comes near you, right? You trust the bad feeling in your gut and the cold fingers caressing your spine, and you run away. You think your senses will always save you from falsehood and terror. But you are dead wrong.

I haven’t lied to you yet. Why do it now? Why, when I put myself through this again for you? There are voices telling you to quit listening to me, voices telling you I’m making things up for attention or fame. They are lying to you. I am not. I will tell you what I saw the last night I stayed at my parents’ house. If I lie, I don’t know if I can live with myself.

I knew the knocking didn’t come from the front door. It was too distant. Had there been someone at the front door, the sound would have been louder. But it wasn’t. It had the faint quality of sounds in dreams. The way a scream from a nightmare can ring in your ears a few seconds after you wake up, the knocking persisted. I did not move. I made sure not to make a sound. I needed to get out of the house, it seemed. Spending too much time in the dust and gloom could mess you up. In the moments after I heard the knocking, my will broke. I decided it was about time that I took a break from this house. I deserved a reward for visiting this decrepit shack after all these years. This was the place where we had prospered, true, but it was also the place where my mother had withered and rotted. How many afternoons had she spent here, a skeleton woman wrapped in shawls? Too many. She shouldn’t have been confined to this crypt. And neither should I.

I strode towards the front door. My hand was on the knob when I heard it again. My legs lost their strength. The knocking was louder, and this time, I could tell where it came from. Upstairs, no doubt. In one of the bedrooms, those cold places stripped bare and forgotten. The knocking came from there.

I wish I could tell you I knew better. Part of me did. But when my father had fallen down the basement stairs and twisted his ankle at my sister’s house, the way he let her know he was hurt was by banging on the wall. They heard him screaming, too, but their dog picked up on the knocking before they heard him. They got him to the ER in time. My sister wasn’t a perfect person, and no one could be. But she answered calls whenever you needed her to. She paid attention to every sound. She would have gone up there. It was probably something broken, I reasoned, or maybe the air conditioning was acting up. I went up there because I had to. I went up there because I hadn’t been in the room when my mom had died. I went up because apparently, this house wasn’t done with me yet. It was calling me back. Begging for me to come back. Grabbing at my ankles as I tried to run away, because it knew that I had abandoned it before, and I wasn’t going to abandon it again.

The railing was cold. My throat went dry and sticky. The knocking was violent, uneven, thunderous. It reminded me of someone choking, the way they heave and cough when trying to dislodge the object. Spasms of noise from elsewhere, the cry of a constricted throat. It came from my room.

I pushed open the door. It opened soundlessly. My eyes went to the closet, then to the bare corners of the room. . . before hooking themselves to the bed.

Sometimes the worst things are in the center, as opposed to the corners.

Do not lose faith in me here, please. I have not lied to you. It will be that way forever.

I said before that if I lied, I wouldn’t be able to live with myself. There is no greater truth than that, I swear. No greater truth.

On the bed was me.

At first, I thought it was my corpse. It looked the part, anyway. The skin was loose and baggy, stretched thin over bulging broken veins and frail bones. I could tell it was me by my skin. Even in death, it still had the same brown color. . . although now it was mottled and patchy, looking the way the skin does on a cup of chai. My body was supine on my old bed. Had it been given the curse of sight, it would have seen only the ceiling I had slept under during my childhood. The hands were skeletal, withering and decaying. The feet were calloused, the toes curled. The room smelled like my mother had in her final days. I had tried not to wrinkle my nose as I sat by her hospital bed, tried not to taste the bile collecting in my throat. I prayed she was sleeping when things were this way. Hopefully she didn’t have to endure the tight cocoon of death, feeling its embrace on her skin. Hopefully she never felt what I felt now.

Had this only been a corpse, things would be slightly less fraught in my head. But the house wasn’t done with me. I was getting ready to turn and bolt into the afternoon sunlight when the body raised its head.

Come here, it rasped.

I did not move.

Come here.

Suddenly, the door slammed behind me. The lock clicked shut. I rattled the knob, but it did not open.

The body raised his hand, and I froze. But my old clone did not raise its hand against me. Instead, it reached over the golden bedpost and banged on the wall behind the bed three times. I shuddered. It had wanted to see me for all this time.

I shambled over. I stood by the bed. My features were elongated in age. My eyes were cloudy and bloodshot. My hair was wispy and burned gold in the afternoon sunlight. My face was sunken, hollow, and when it opened its mouth to speak again, I saw no teeth.

Do you see a shard of glass before you?

I looked and saw a crescent-shaped sickle of glass on the mattress. I realized in hindsight that a chunk of the window was missing. When did it do that?

Take it and cut my throat.

“Why?”

Because it is time.

“But I can’t.”

I will guide your hand.

He reached out and touched me. He nudged my hand towards the shard. It shook, but he held it steady, leading me to his fleshy, soft throat. When I didn’t dig the blade in as quickly as he wanted, he pressed my hand down into his flesh. He gasped and made a choking sound when I drew the blade across his throat. Blood poured out of the wound in a gushing stream. His bedclothes and the mattress became stained red. He held my hand until the end, until I had ended his life. The gash on his throat was a long, toothless smile. His hands were as cold as ever.

My dead body lay before me.

The house was silent for a long time. Satisfied, perhaps. For now.

The shard of glass left my hand in those long moments after. My hands were slick with blood. I hobbled over to the bathroom and washed them in our sink for the last time.

I stood beneath the doorframe. From a distance, the wound on the neck looked like a red ribbon. The same way the bedclothes they gave at the hospital looked like funeral whites on my mother. It’s funny, the way horrific things look nice from far away.

Like our house, for instance.

No lies anywhere here. Only truth. I’ve told you what I saw. Perhaps you believe me, perhaps you don’t. It doesn’t matter. The house kept me all the same. Maybe it wanted to show me a preview of my death. Maybe that’s why it brought me back. But who knows. All I can tell is that I died alone in that house. The house got all of us in the end. Dad, weak and feeble, brooding over his dead wife’s old photos. My sister, learning to cook with her old pans. Mom, a mere cup of ashes.

And me, stuck in my childhood room with my dead body. The blood dried on the mattress and carpet. I mourned myself because I could mourn no one else.

One last truth: the house was rather peaceful. Towards the end, I wanted to stay. But I didn’t want to be there at sundown. I left through the front door and watched as the garage door rattled shut. My old bedroom window reflected the last of the day’s light. I got in my car and drove down Marbury Drive. I must confess that I did not look back. Not even a quick glance. I kept my eyes on the road and drove away.

But that doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten our house.

Nor has it forgotten me, I fear.

Shiv Majmudar has published fiction in the Alabama Literary Review. His stories have been recognized by the Writers of the Future Contest. A senior at Olentangy Orange High School, he lives in Westerville, Ohio.

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