by Melissa Grunow
The personification creates distance from the “I” while still giving space to an experience that is highly personal and typically unspoken.
Perhaps it’s like a crawl space under a home, an old home, one that would also have a root cellar or a fallout shelter or a sitting parlor or a servant’s quarters, or all of those things. The home itself has been updated, restored, neglected, then again loved and cared for under new ownership. The crawl space, however, is a dark, cold forgotten place, rife with thick cobwebs, discarded wood ash from the central fireplace degrading into the dirt floor.
The space is rarely explored, at least to this depth, and now there is an obstruction. If it doesn’t get removed, the long-term integrity of the entire house could be compromised. A darkness like black mold, an infection of sorts, would seep upward and outward, penetrating the structure to crawl along every vein and artery that remains hidden under the heavy plaster walls. The dust in the HVAC system would cough and choke, the knob and tube wiring would short out—maybe even catch fire—the old iron pipes would groan, crack, vomit rust into the ceramic sinks.
All the experts will agree: the obstruction is an easy removal. Just as quickly as it’s designed to fill the space beneath the house, it’s engineered to be removed five years later (or maybe it will become seven; they’re still conducting studies), collapsing onto itself and emerging with a gentle tug of the retrieval strings. The house is prone to reproducing unwanted rooms; the twice-a-decade swap of the obstruction will prevent that. It’s 99.7 percent effective; the most effective form of its kind of the market.
A handyman disappears under the house with a flashlight and a clamp, expected to return in a few minutes with the obstruction. She narrates her way through the narrow cavities, explaining what she sees, or more importantly, what she doesn’t see. The house groans around her. She cannot find the strings; there is nothing to pull.
A contractor arrives a week later with an apprentice and a radar technician who will stand in front of the hearth in the parlor, compressing the floor and projecting a sonar image of what she sees. The flashlight was not enough; they come equipped with state-of-the-art technology to seek out those illusive strings and give them a tug.
The contractor disappears into the crawl space. She doesn’t explain what she sees. She expresses her compassion for the house, each time it groans and creaks, her equipment putting pressure on its most sensitive cavities.
It should take ten minutes, less with a crew of that size, that level of experience. After nearly an hour, the plaster walls of the house begin to sweat, the foundation begins to tremble. The apprentice opens the windows, turns on a fan, attempts to cool the house while the contractor and the radar tech pack up their equipment.
“It’s likely embedded,” the contractor says. “We need to reschedule and bring a bigger team out here.” They will have to return in a month when the house goes into hibernation. A sleeping house is a house that cannot groan, sweat, or feel.
She doesn’t say so, but she must have bumped a rusted pipe or brushed against an old shut-off valve, for the faucet in the powder room develops a slow, steady drip that cannot be stopped. The drips are the color of blood and remain constant, falling one at a time, splashing against the ceramic basin like quiet tears rolling over the subtle lines of aging skin.
By starting this essay with “perhaps,” readers are immediately immersed in the imagined, which is—to me—the starting point for speculative nonfiction. I wrote about this experience as speculative, rather than “real,” because the experience itself was so traumatic, invasive, and even a little embarrassing, that the only way I could tell the story was through the use of extended metaphor. The body becomes a house, the midwife at the busy gynecologist’s office becomes the handyman, and the doctor becomes a hired contractor with the nurse-as-apprentice assisting. Through the extended metaphor and imagined scene of an obstruction in a dark crawl space, I personify the house as it experiences pain, begins to sweat and tremble, and bleeds out through a leaking rusted pipe. The personification creates distance from the “I” while still giving space to an experience that is highly personal and typically unspoken.
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Melissa Grunow is the author of I Don’t Belong Here: Essays and the four-time award-winning memoir, Realizing River City. Her work has appeared in Brevity, River Teeth, The Nervous Breakdown, Two Hawks Quarterly, New Plains Review, and Blue Lyra Review, among many others. Her essays have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, as well as listed in the Best American Essays notables 2016, 2018, and 2019. She is an assistant professor of English at Illinois Central College. Visit her website at www.melissagrunow.com for more information.