A Window is Also a Wall

The apartment had been vacant for hours. That morning, the furniture had gone, slipping away over the floorboards like shadows moved by the passage of the day. The rooms now warped and changed shape as though shrugging off a fixed and tired facade. In their frames, the windows yelped under pressure. Along the floor-line, decorative moldings sizzled and jumped. In the living room, the portals to bedroom, kitchen, and bath yawned like absences of infinite mass, each sucking and slurping at the contours of their own emptiness. Denuded of its coverings and armatures, returned to its original prismatic form, the room's six faces took on the abstracted austerity of a surrealist architecture, startling geometries primly complying with the demands of linear perspective. Only in the details did it become more imperfect and more human. The rough and tumble of life inscribed itself on walls caked and stippled with paint like a lunar landscape rendered in white semi-gloss primer. Abstract designs of scuffs and scrapes indexed a struggle—the residue of bike wheels as they scrabbled for purchase, the death rattle of a wardrobe hitting home in an excess of inertia and failed human strength. — Nicole Kaack