The house sits old and grey beneath the infinite white sky, stretching for years and doubling back into oblivion. There is no sun—the only color comes from the bright red rust on an old Chevy pickup, popping like welts in the 2-D landscape. Ava’s breath comes fast and white, vapor exploding in front of her and dissipating against the distant white cliffs. Her boots on the gravel crack in her ears, heels digging in with gunshots, while all around the earth lets off not even a sigh.
Home, she thinks, but her smile is a snarl. She remembers it like this, silent and white, grey and endless. Even the white door is the same, thought it’s less white and more grey and more chips of paint dust the front step. Her knock is the same sonic thrust as her boots in the gravel, and it’s enough in the utter silence to send her heart up into her throat.
Six years old, clutching a hand, a big hand, she can’t see whose anymore because everything above her own head has faded into black. She is crying, screaming, in short bursts. Her foot is on fire, it flares and subsides but still she can feel the flesh sizzle, searing in the lightless flame. Overhead, knuckles on peeling white wood rip through the focus of the pain, and her crying quiets but she can’t tell if the gasps are for her lungs or her limb.
“Elena, Elena, open the door!”
The voice, man or woman, is lost with the face, with everything but pain and a hand, but the words are there, written over the memory like a comic book caption: “Elena, Elena, abre la puerta!”
A flood of light comes as the door swoops open, but Ava still can’t remember faces, so high overhead, but she remembers warmth and shrieks.
“Ay, dios! There’s blood everywhere, what happened? I’ll call his mother. No. Call his mother. Gordo, gordito, come to the bathroom, don’t cry! Pobresito, what did you do?”
And then she remembers the bathtub, hot hot water, clothes still on, the blood and the pus, the bubbling burning flesh as the hydrogen peroxide cauterized her mistake. The crying was quiet, but still Elena, with her big soft white arms and cobwebbed dyed hair, mumbled, “Shhh, shhh, pobresito, your mother will be home soon. How many times has she told you not to go near the ants?”
She doesn’t remember her mother coming home.
The man at the door isn’t old, but he’s already grey, and for a split moment Ava wonders if it were the cliffs that turned him grey. His smile is congenial, amiable but bland, entirely civil and entirely societal. She smiles back, her practiced, perfected one, full and warm and bright and entirely false.
“Hi, I know this is very strange, but I’m Ava Foglia… my family lived here before you, I grew up here.”
He smiles, and she smiles, and she says something that means nothing, explains something without an explanation, but he lets her in anyway, and under the kitchen halogens she wishes for a moment that she were a murderer, a robber, anything. For a moment, she wants to violate something in this house. She wants the walls, calm, she’s sure, for so many years, to remember the sound of crying. She smiles, though, like she was born for it, and the grey man looks uncomfortable but he smiles too and lets her stand under the kitchen halogens, white and blank like this smile, like the cliffs.
The dead roach, a dark spot in the opaque fiberglass fluorescent shield. There for months probably, before she noticed it, and months after she did. Under blank white halogens, she stands, and the dark spot is gone, removed by the man her mother introduced a few times, one introduction between others, but always recurring, a big man, big hands, who fixed sinks that gurgled and cleaned dead roaches from the lights.
The roach is gone and she moves, six years old, out sliding French doors into breaking morning light, the warm grey quiet of dawn. On the wall, she sees as she breathes the warmth, are three roaches, big big and big, precisely aligned, perfectly huge, hideous, horrifying, perfectly black against the white wall.
As she wanders through the house the man keeps close behind her, chatting, asking, smiling, anything to keep back reality, and she plays the game, smiles back, drops little differences now and then in rooms and about placement and pretends not to notice his falter as she runs her fingertips along hallways’ white walls. Then, a familiar doorframe underneath, ridged, not smooth, the divider breaking endless white and giving birth to blossoming blue, soft like her old blanket, some cheap cotton thing meant by the color to advertise “boy”, then thrown out when the color was thrown up on these four walls.
Tall man, big hands, big face, big big big. He stands, eyes on the ceiling, walls, her, and everywhere the smell of paint soaking into her clothes and nose and making her dizzy. He says, “Better,” in his big voice, and his eyes are still on her, hard.
“Now you’ll remember not to get dirty handprints on the walls, won’t you?”
She nods, because his eyes are so hard, and she silently begs her mother to come home.
The grey man is quiet, finally, and she knows it’s time to get out. She’s almost done, anyway, laughed at all the little trivial changes, and back in the kitchen she shakes his hand under the burning halogen. He looks surprised suddenly, a flash in his grey eyes, so she just smiles and grabs her hand back and looks around at the silent white walls and smiles and smiles under the halogen lights she’s staring at that dark spot in the fiberglass, just staring like it’s the only thing that’s real, the dead roach, trapped in the heat of the burning gas, as a big hand tightens over her mouth.
She’s crying, but it’s silent, like everything else, everything but big groans, and the fire rips up from between her legs through her belly and chest to her head, making her dizzy while her flesh boils and bubbles under big hands.
When she sits, alone, in the center of four white walls, her whole body’s on fire. She’s watching it blister and burn, melting out between her legs, seeping slowly, and she wants, tries, to catch it and put it all back inside. The walls watch, and when she can’t feel the burning anywhere except everywhere, she watches herself melt from the inside out and it’s the only color in the room, bright like the rust on the old Chevy truck big hands drive. She burns the white of the walls with herself, and her hands are covered in color, her hands and legs and feet are so bright, she slaps her palms across the unforgiving whiteness again and again until the fire consumes her.
When dawn breaks, slow and grey, the only color comes from long strips of rust on an old Chevy pickup, the grey man notices it parked in front of his home, it’s been there all night he tells the police on the phone, and when the police ring doorbells on the block no one knows whose it is, but finally an old Spanish woman in the last house goes white. She follows the police, silent, and it’s been years but yes, she says, that’s Adam, though the driver’s license says Ava, and color spills from wounds on his wrists and between his legs, a brash rusted red against the worn grey of the seats.
