Crash and Burn
(After photographs by Peter Garfield)
The basement drops first, too heavy to lift. Goodbye mortar and stone with a penchant for mold. Goodbye grandfather clock with your broken gong and a piano missing half its teeth. Boxes of books and baby clothes shock from sudden light. Spiders cleave to every fold, their hairline mouths and sticky sacks shatter in a shower of concrete. The living room refuses to land, a triangular cape with shingled wings that cries from Calgary to Cancun and back again, smashing windows along the way, ripping free of the chimney, its blackened brick and drag. Wires unravel like veins across the sky, dance a secret alphabet. Vertigo for the television and stereo who bury themselves at sea. The bedroom surrenders ivory walls, splayed open, vulnerable without curtains. The queen bed slumps her bulk against an oak. Crows shred her ticking heart.