Moving On

My mother is moving for the first time in thirty years, but memories have no sense of time and so the thing in the attic lingers.

It grew from late-night fights, watered by my parents’ rage and disappointment. Their misery piled up like guano beneath the attic window and in that fertile earth, something else grew.

I crawled up the ladder sometimes to cry to it, sweating in the dark while my parents screamed their dissatisfaction at one another.

By the time I was a teenager, its roots burrowed through the walls from the attic, spreading beneath the new siding like termites. In the concrete masquerading as wood, insects would’ve found nothing to eat, but the thing in the attic gorged itself. With every room it infiltrated it heard more, grew more, until nowhere was safe.

I went up the stairs sideways to keep it from sneaking up on me.

My mother sends me photos as she packs: stuffed animals, a journal with only three pages of childish scrawl, a yearbook from a school whose reunions I’ll never attend.

*Are these important to you?*

The trash piles up and her dutiful new husband carries it away while my childhood accumulates behind her like the artifacts of an archeological dig.

I track her progress through the house by text.

In the kitchen: a kitschy collection of dishes and the entire cookware aisle of Home Goods.

*Do you need this?*

In the living room: Grandma’s old furniture, too formal for my mother's new house.

*Let’s keep it in the family.*

On Saturday, in the morning before the heat gathers in the eaves like the bats that cling to the louvered vents, she makes her way to the attic and I wonder if she’ll finally see it.

“Why are there mosquitoes?” I asked her, in the summer darkness when I was young enough to believe she had all the answers.

“They feed the bats,” she replied. “One bat eats hundreds of them every night.”

’Why are there bats, then?”

“To eat the mosquitoes.”

The bats swooped through the air, flicking and darting almost too fast to see in pursuit of something no one else wanted. In the morning they pressed close together, secrets incarnate in furry little bodies, hiding from the light.

The contract is closed, the house is empty.

I creep up the attic ladder one last time.

The thing in the attic doesn’t fight me. It is replete, content to wait for a new family, to feed on their suburban aspirations, inevitable disappointments, and small tragedies.

The gasoline vaporizes into dizzying fumes and I hope the bats have found a new home. Standing on the ladder, I toss a match. The air explodes, chasing darkness from the corners as it tosses me down the last few rungs onto my back, winded.

The thing in the attic watches me from the fire and I wonder as it burns if it is sprouting again in my mother’s new home, or in mine.