Small Houses
by James P. Blaylock  

The windows in the tiny wooden house faced east and west so as to get the most out of the sunlight, which was filtered by avocado leaves the year around. And it was in the west window that Johnson now placed an empty fishbowl: sparkling clean, its gravel rinsed, its glass walls wiped clean of algae—not a bowl at all, strictly speaking, but a three gallon lidless cube salvaged from a chemistry laboratory. In the height of the summer, which was by now two months gone, the sun crossed the sky almost overhead, and the house was illuminated by leafy sunlight through a bank of windows under the shallow eaves, but in the autumn the sun fell away again in the direction of the ocean, and the interior grew dim, so that Johnson needed a lamp to read by even at mid-day. 
With the turning of the seasons he shifted the fish bowl around the small room, because he took a keen enjoyment in the rays of sunlight that rippled in the clear water and shone through the translucent green leaves of the waterweeds. It occurred to him now that a competent engineer might have designed the house to spin on a sort of lazy-susan platform, like a rotating stage in a theatre, so that it could be moved on its axis to take advantage of natural light. 
But he was no engineer; he was at best a carpenter, or had been before he retired. He had built the house in the avocado tree forty years ago out of redwood fence lumber, setting it not on the tree branches themselves, but within them, resting it on posts fixed in concrete pilings. In the years since, the tree limbs had bent and bowed and draped around and over the rough-cut wooden walls and roof as if to embrace them. As time passed and the foliage thickened, the natural light had dwindled, which was to be expected, since that was the way with everything. 
Johnson had made a few additions and changes to the treehouse in more recent years—in the years, that is to say, following Myrtle's death on the eve of their anniversary—enclosing the posts to make a garden shed of the space below, and more recently digging a trench across the back yard to pipe in water and electricity and to pipe out sewage, turning the treehouse into something more livable. He had enclosed a cold water shower, too, the kind of thing that he couldn't have done when Myrt was alive, nor would have had any need to do, except as an antidote for idle hands. 
He emptied bottled water into the fishbowl now, filling it to within an inch of the top, and then, in the bucket on the floor, he swirled debris out of the waterweeds before wiggling them down into the gravel in the bottom of the bowl, burying the lead weight wrapped around the base of the clump. Beside the greenery he placed a porcelain castle with an arched tunnel. Even if a man couldn't live in his castle, he could at least pass through it from time to time. He bent over the bucket again to net out the fish, a Chinese telescope moor, uncommonly fat and with bulging eyes. It had been Myrt who had named the fish Septimus, which was a damned good name for a fish. When he released it into the clean water, the sunlight shone on the gold stomach scales and glowed through the jet black translucent veiltail and fins, and the bowl was transformed into the living ornament it was meant to be. 

· · · · · 

It had been forty years ago that Johnson had been working in his garage shop, stacking boards and drinking coffee, when he had abruptly gotten the idea of building his own coffin, or better yet casket, just like the tattooed cannibal in the story: a simple wooden box, without the morbid shape of old fashioned wooden coffins, that would function during his life as a tool box. He envisioned compartments for hammers and saws and planes, for squares and levels and a set of bits and augers; cubbyholes for nails and screws and wood dough; slots and panels that could be arranged and rearranged over the passing years until, when the sun was setting at last, metaphorically speaking, he could remove the interior complications more or less altogether, leaving only a nook and a cranny for the few things, beside himself, that he wanted to take along to the afterlife. 
He had instantly pictured the finished box in his head: its length, its width and depth, the arrangement of tools, the sliding panels and cubbyholes. And in that same instant he had picked out what he would take: the several books that he would want in the end, what he and Myrt liked to call their desert island books, which, along with a cribbage board, a deck of cards, a bottle of sherry, and a couple of glasses would very nearly do the trick. A bowl of popcorn suggested itself, but he couldn't see any way to make it work. 

· · · · · 

The fish moved lazily around its kingdom now, going to the surface to gulp air, swimming awkwardly in its obese way, peering myopically out at the world. "Why two glasses?" he asked the fish aloud, watching it wiggle its way through the arch of the castle. "In case rigor mortis should set in," he answered, laughing shamelessly at the old joke. 
Watching the fish swim through the clear water, he noticed a gently moving reflection in the glass itself now, although when he tried to make it out it disappeared. When he looked beyond it again, focusing on the now-hovering fish, the reflection reappeared, a shadowy bending motion, as of someone reaching down into a trunk or a box to retrieve something, and then standing and turning away. He looked behind him, and through the window saw that a limb from the avocado tree was bowing in the afternoon breeze, but he could see nothing in it that suggested the reflection in the glass. When he turned back to the bowl, Septimus was still hovering in the water beyond the open arch of the castle, looking back out at him, but the sun seemed to strike the glass from a slightly lower angle, and the reflection was gone. 

· · · · · 

On that morning forty years ago he had come into the kitchen for another cup of coffee, where he found Myrtle washing dishes at the sink. In an ill-thought-out rush of enthusiasm he had told her about the "box," as if she would be placated by the euphemism. She hadn't even looked up: no shock of horror, no gasp of surprise, certainly no notion that his idea had any value. She had simply gone on with the dishes as if she hadn't heard him. He laughingly mentioned the two glasses and the sherry in order to work the rigor mortis joke on her and lighten the leaden silence, but it hadn't helped, and her wordless dismissal of the subject had lasted the rest of her life. 
Afterward he had gone walking by himself in the neighborhood, designing the fine points of the box in his head: the joinery and the finish, how he would cleat the outside with cross members, top and bottom both, to keep the planks from cupping over the years. He had some heavy brass screws that would make a nice pattern against the oiled oak. Beyond the exposed screws, however, and the finger-jointed corners and the cleating, there would be no ornamentation at all. When it came to the afterlife, fancy gewgaws were like coals to Newcastle, or worse, shameless marks of vanity. The same could be said about a toolbox, which was meant to be functional rather than decorative. 
On his walk he had gone some distance beyond his usual haunts, and could not recognize the name of the tree-shaded street that he found himself on. He was on the point of turning around to retrace his steps when he saw an open garage door. In the dim interior a sheet of plywood was set up across a couple of big cardboard boxes. Odds and ends of old junk lay on the floor, and although there was no sign posted, and no one visible inside, from the look of things it was pretty clearly a garage sale. He stepped in out of the sunlight, and right off he found a half dozen things to buy: a keyhole saw, an old bottle jack, some heavy brass strap hinges for a nickel a throw that even back then were worth five bucks. They were more showy than a piano hinge, but they were solid enough to work first rate on the casket lid. 
At about the time he had these treasures collected, an old woman came out from inside the house with a shoe box full of barware that had seen its day. Among the muddlers and swizzle sticks and cork pullers was a single sherry glass, lead crystal etched with a likeness of Queen Isabella of Spain. The glass held perhaps three ounces, and had an octagonal base and a gold rim, the gold worn thin from long years of use. Johnson bought it at once, thinking about the afterlife again. Of course in time he would want two of them, one for himself and one for Myrt. If she made it to the next place before he did, then he would bring the glasses and the sherry and the rest of it along and catch up with her there. If he went on ahead first, then he would be ready for her when she arrived. 
And of course buying the single glass right now pretty much justified his building the casket—which, he would readily admit, tempted the hell out of fate—because the single glass answered that particular superstitious dread with a counter-element of superstition: you could safely tempt fate, he reasoned, by building your own coffin, if you challenged fate to find you a matching sherry glass. Fate wasn't always dealt the high card; like anyone else, it had to wait for the aces to come around. 
Even the likeness of Queen Isabella was a kind of portent, or at least it was another piece that fit in with the growing puzzle of their lives: Myrt enjoyed a glass of sherry, a habit she had acquired years ago during their European travel, and Johnson had developed a taste for the stuff himself, at first out of deference to her. In Barcelona they had found a dusty old rectangular bottle in a market off a narrow alley, estimating from the layer of dust and from the price that the contents must somehow be remarkable. At their pension, Johnson had accidentally dropped it onto the stones of the courtyard, and the sherry had certainly smelled as good as it must have tasted. Myrt had soaked the label off the shards and pressed it in a big dictionary. Much later yet—twenty years? twenty five?—Johnson had found an identical bottle on the shelf of a Vietnamese liquor store in Little Saigon, entirely by chance, the squatty green bottle catching his eye. He had brought it home and given it to her with a bouquet of roses, and Myrt had dug the old label out of the dictionary to compare it. 
It was still faintly scented with sherry after the long years, and had called up memories. Swept with nostalgia, Johnson had shown her the garage sale sherry glass, making up a stretcher about why and when he had bought it. Having only one of them, they had found two other glasses to toast with, and early the next morning, while Myrtle was still sleeping, he had retrieved the sherry glass from where it still sat downstairs and returned it to its lonesome double niche among the tools in the box, sliding the little protective panel door closed in front of it. 

· · · · · 

Nowadays his shop was closed up, locked with a big padlock. The few tools he needed for routine maintenance he kept below the treehouse in the renovated garden shed. The key to the shop padlock, along with his long disused house keys, also lay in a niche in the casket, or more accurately in the toolbox, since he was still living and breathing. Over these last few years he had become a man who carried with him only a single key—only the one key for the old Cadillac, which with a certain artistic foresight he'd had re-keyed a decade ago so that the ignition key and the trunk key were the same. He had a copy in a magnetic Hide-a-key box hidden beneath the bumper, but a copy wasn't the thing itself, and anyway the magnetic box might have lost its hold and fallen onto the roadway years ago, as often happened. 
Septimus nosed the top of the water, and Johnson pinched some flakes out of the canister of food and sprinkled them into the bowl. Someone had told him that a goldfish's stomach was only as big as its eye, in contrast to people, whose eyes were often bigger than their stomachs. Whether any of this was true he didn't know, but it was true that a well fed fish could easily live for a month or more without food, and for that he was grateful: if he were to pass away—when, that is to say—the postman at least would find the mail piling up in the box out front, and one thing would lead to another. 
He picked up the empty bucket and went out, hauling it down the stairs that wrapped around the tree trunk and setting it in the shed below. Then he ascended the stairs again, stopping for a breather on the first landing. His heart fluttered like a small and helpless bird, and he felt the familiar faintness coming on, and the shooting pains in his arm, profound enough so that he sat down hard on the plank stair and focused all of his energy simply on the moment, on his own being and on the sun-dappled shadows that moved roundabout him. He leaned his head against the railing post, breathing in the scent of weathered redwood mingled with the sharp bay leaf smell of dead avocado leaves. After a time the pain in his arm faded and he stood up again, got his bearings, and climbed to the tiny verandah, where he entered the small house, stepping onto the little piece of Turkish carpet and lying down on the bed. He gazed again at the sunlit fishbowl, listening to the rustling of leaves in the afternoon wind. It occurred to him now that his existence had largely been that of a beachcomber on the lookout for seashells and flotsam, finding lucky odds and ends by chance up near the high tide line, as he had found the first sherry glass or the second bottle in the market, and that although the swiftly passing days were slipping away from him, they hadn't failed to cast up their small bounty of souvenirs. He closed his eyes finally and drifted off to sleep, the noise of the wind dwindling in his ears. 
He awakened when the sun was lower in the sky, and the small room had gotten dim. He lay peacefully, watching the curious shadowy movement in the glass of the goldfish bowl again, and again there was something about the movement that didn't look like leaves and branches at all, that had something of a human shape and purpose, like successive moving images of someone, or an infinity of someones, returning again and again to perform a small task, bending and reaching and straightening up like the staccato moving images in an endlessly repeated film strip. 
Johnson's heart had evened out again, although he still felt weak. He stood up, getting his sea legs under him, and clicked on the gooseneck lamp that lit the fishbowl. At once the moving shadows disappeared, the illuminated glass harboring no reflections. There were a couple of hours at most before dark, and he had some little distance to travel before he could sleep—not miles to go, like the poet, but far enough so that he couldn't waste time if he was going to get the job done. He descended the stairs and entered the garden shed, where he lifted his carpenter's tools out of the box, laying them carefully on the several shelves lining the wall. He found his house key at the bottom and put it into his pocket along with the key to the Cadillac, then walked out onto the tree-sheltered back lawn, finding with unexpected happiness that the autumn sun had a certain amount of warmth in it. The fig tree against the redwood fence on the other side of the yard was shedding enormous yellow leaves, one of which drifted to the ground beside him as if to illustrate the passing of the season. 
He crossed to the car port, looking at the closed up house, the clapboards layered with dust, and he swung open the gate, heading out toward the front sidewalk, latching the gate carefully behind him. He opened the driver's side door on the Cadillac, leaned in, and slipped the key into the ignition, then backed out of the car and shut the door. Out front, the neighborhood was going about its usual Sunday afternoon business. He waved cheerfully at a neighbor, who, after a seemingly puzzled moment, waved back at him, and he stood for a moment to watch a dozen crows hard at work in the branches of a pecan tree across the street, the broken husks of the pecans littering the sidewalk below, staining the concrete with brown streaks as they had done every autumn without fail. 
He turned to look at the front of his house, taking it all in: the broad front porch with its rusted porch lamp and swing with rusted chains, the overgrown bushes in the flowerbeds, the big glass picture window with dusty and sun-faded curtains long ago drawn across it. He climbed up onto the porch and fitted the key into the door knob, pushed the door open, and, after locking the door behind him again, walked into the kitchen, breathing in the dusty, closed-up scent of the place. He half expected the kitchen clock to have stopped at some defining moment, but it hadn't, and the seconds ticked away as ever. The clock was a white porcelain Delft affair with blue Dutch children wearing wooden shoes standing in front of a blue Dutch windmill—something Myrt had found in one of the antique shops that she had frequented downtown. The clock's old thread-wrapped cord wasn't in the least frayed, a testimony to better days, when the things of man were built to outlive their owners. 
He had felt that way about the casket when he had built it, and he still did. Despite its destination, there was no reason that the joinery shouldn't be tight and square and the materials first rate. He had driven into Los Angeles, to a big lumberyard that sold hardwoods, where he had picked out quarter-sawn oak planks without any checking or splitting. They had cost him plenty, in time and money both. He had hand rubbed tung oil into the wood to finish it, renewing it every New Years Day through all the years since, making up excuses for the hour or so he spent in the shop while Myrt watched the Rose Parade. All in all it was a shame that a man's coffin couldn't be left to later generations, like a well-built chair. But like the man himself, it was a piece of furniture that was meant to be buried. Time and dust, he thought, running his finger over the Formica countertop and smiling at his own joke, happen to us all. 
He went into the living room now and sat down heavily on the couch to rest. Dust motes swirled in the sun rays that slanted between the window curtains, and the clock ticked away heavily, filling the house with its solemn reminder. He looked around, recalling those times when he had lived in this room every day and evening, when he had come down the stairs before dawn and turned on the lamp, when he had gone to bed at night and turned the lamp off again. His eyes were drawn to the narrow hallway that led back to Myrt's sewing room. She had long ago hung a framed mirror on the hallway wall to give it the illusion of size, and from where he sat, looking at the mirror nearly edge-on, the glass was a confusion of shadows, which, like the ghostly reflections in the glass of the fishbowl, seemed to him to be moving. He watched curiously—seeing in it the same suggestive shape, the bowing and reaching and turning insistently repeated—and after a moment he stood up and walked toward the hallway, regarding the shadows until they faded from view and it was his own face he was looking at in the mirror. 
He opened the door to the sewing room and walked in, seeing the cut-out pattern parts still lying on the long table—pieces of a shirt she had been sewing for him. The old ironing board with its ivy-decorated cloth stood against the wall in the corner. Nearby sat the silent sewing machine, and next to that the sewing cabinet that he had built with wood left over from the casket. He wondered suddenly if his building the sewing cabinet had been inspired by guilt: probably it had—but good things sometimes resulted from dubious motives, and in the end it was all one. 
On the opposite wall the closet door stood part way open, and he shut it now, admiring the door knob, which was made of old leaded glass that had turned purple in the sun, another of Myrt's antique store purchases. It had always been the loveliest door knob in the house, and Johnson had never been the type to despise a doorknob or any other simple and unadorned thing. Taking out a handkerchief now, he wiped the glass clean of dust and peered into its transparent depths, where he saw once again the familiar shadowy movement. Knowing that the room behind him was still, the curtains drawn across the windows, he abandoned the idea that what he saw was a reflection. It was rather the presence of something, or of someone. 
He turned slowly, expecting he knew not what, and for a brief moment there appeared on the wall behind the sewing cabinet the same moving shadow, which dimmed and disappeared in the moment that his mind acknowledged what it was—the shadow, or perhaps the shade, of a woman opening the lid of the sewing cabinet and removing something from inside—or else putting something there. He stepped to the box, put his own hand on the dusty wooden pull, and opened it. There, lying among bobbins and spools of thread, lay a small package wrapped in white paper and a ribbon and bow. There was a card attached, the corner of its envelope slid through the ribbon. 
It was an anniversary card from Myrt, undelivered. Clearly she had hid the package in the sewing chest, waiting for the day of their anniversary. He read the card twice and put it into his pocket, and then slipped the ribbon off the box and pulled the paper loose, balling it up and tossing it into the trash. Inside the box was a tissue-wrapped gift the size of his hand. He hesitated, stopping to catch his breath, to listen once more to the now-muted ticking of the clock. Slowly he removed the tissue, finding inside a sherry glass identical to the first: the same etching, the gold rim, the octagonal base …. 
Carrying the glass he walked back out into the hallway, across the living room, and into the kitchen again. He opened the cabinet that held the few bottles that he and Myrt had kept for company, and took out the square bottle of sherry, put away at the rear of the shelf since that first toast when he had brought it home from the Vietnamese market. 
At the back door he hesitated for a moment, leaning his weight against the wall and looking back one last time, before tossing the house key onto the kitchen floor and closing the locked door forever behind him. 
When he stepped into the sheltered darkness of the garden shed, the casket was a long shadow on the low sawhorses that supported it. He had always noticed that there was a time right at dusk when, even with the lights on, things were darker than they would be a half hour hence, when it was night, and this was surely such a time. He set the bottle and glass down and leaned against the casket itself, catching his breath for a moment before going on, letting his eyes adjust, wanting to get through this in what was left of the light of day. 
Earlier he had emptied the tools out of the box, and now he slowly and carefully disassembled the various notched-together panels that had defined its useful existence, laying the wooden dividers behind him until the casket contained only the built-in compartments, most of which already held his afterlife accoutrements. He slipped the bottle down into its own narrow space and the sherry glass into its niche, and just like that the thing was finished. He stood for another moment regarding it. The cribbage board and the deck of cards were one of the travel sets they had used early in their marriage, and he found that they were only barely familiar to him now. He took the plastic wrap off the first of the books, Priestley's The Good Companions, and riffled the pages, finding an old postcard bookmark with a picture of Yosemite Valley on it. The sight of the card made him think of the label on the first sherry bottle, still pressed in the dictionary inside the house, and for a moment he regretted the loss of the house key. But the label wasn't useful, really. It was mere nostalgia, and there wasn't a lot of room for nostalgia in a casket. The idea almost made him laugh, but his heart began to skip and flutter, and abruptly he found himself sitting on the floor, looking up at the tarnished brass screws in the wooden cleats that criss-crossed the bottom of the box. 
He realized that he had passed out, and he sat there recovering for a minute before he hauled himself heavily to his feet and made his unsteady way back outside, looking up into the sky. There was still enough sunlight in the west to call it dusk, and a scattering of fleecy white clouds made the sky above the sunset look interminably deep. He rested three times ascending the treehouse stairs, and used both hands to turn the doorknob. He was tempted to lie down on the bed for a breather, but he knew it was unlikely he would rise again. 
Septimus bumped around as usual, looking for food, and Johnson fed him again, a healthy pinch, deciding to leave the light on over the bowl. He looked around him one last time, then bent over to straighten the covers on the bed. "Well …," he said out loud, but he couldn't find any useful way to finish the thought. Sentimental old fool, he thought. Myrt had called him that more than once, and apparently she'd been just as right as rain. Closing the door behind him, he went back down the stairs, haltingly, holding on tight to the rail and planting his feet carefully. 
In the shed he realized that his mind was made up, and had been since Myrt had shown him where to find her anniversary gift. It had been a day of indecision, but the second sherry glass had finished the forty-year job of putting together the casket and had made the way clear to him at last. He removed the bottle and the two glasses now and set them on the closed bottom half of the lid. A clutching pain shot down his left arm, and he held his chest, stopping dead still and closing his eyes until it receded to a dull ache. He had to use his teeth to pull the cork from the bottle, and his right hand shook when he poured the two glasses full. 
"Over the river," he said, carrying the first of the glasses to his lips and draining it. He winked at Queen Isabella, and then threw the glass against the wall of the shed, where it shattered and fell. He picked up the second glass, raised it in a silent toast, and drank it too, and then, using up what was left of his strength, he hurled the glass after the first, the shards scattering among the others on the floor. And with the breaking of the sherry glasses he gave up all earthly things, all the small houses in which he had dwelt over the years, including his carefully-built coffin, which had turned out to be a mere toolbox after all. A weight as vast and as heavy as the sky and earth together seemed to be crushing his chest as he fumbled the cork into the bottle and put it back into its niche. 
And now he was free to go, out at last into the hastening evening. His breath came in shallow gasps as he tottered across the yard and sat down hard in the open air among the fallen fig leaves, resting his back against the trunk, the first stars turning far far above him in the sky and the wind rustling the foliage around the house in the tree, nearly hidden now within a leafy darkness. The glow of the fish bowl shone as ever through the shifting foliage, casting its light out into the night, and as he passed away he saw in that light the living memory of the time he had spent with Myrtle, the only thing he would carry with him on his travels. 
The End