Celesta Cox has won the Short Story category of our Writing Contest the Architecture of Home with her piece "Margaret, Mothers, and the Messy Room." We love the way the writing encourages dramatic oral reading and unexpectedly evokes emotion.
Biographical statement: A chemical engineer by day and a poet by night, Celesta Cox is familiar with having multiple identities. Born and raised in Iowa, she now lives in Kansas City. She loves writing with the windows open as cicada song drifts in.
Architecture of Home:
From Sears to Frank Lloyd Wright, the physical architecture of home is constantly evolving.
Is home a new luxury apartment, a farm or homestead, or a cookie cutter in a subdivision? Is your home lousy with pet hair or immaculately tidy? Is it an echo chamber or does it ring loud with the laughter of children. Does your family extend beyond the nuclear
or is it a tight-knit group of three?Tell us what your home is built of. What makes a house a home?
Margaret, Mothers, and the Messy Room.
Margaret Mei Von Pike’s mother was tidy.
No, she wasn’t tidy. She was clean. Clean – the word holds so much more inside of it than tidiness does. Clean spans beyond organization. Clean involves Windex. Clean involves the hose of the vacuum and extends to the corners of the room. Clean involves dusters, even when the dust is invisible.
Margaret would not have minded having a clean mother, perhaps, if she were clean herself. Or even tidy. Or even messy.
But Margaret was worse than messy. She was the opposite of her mother. Her extreme antonym. She was dirty. She was never-wash-the-sheets dirty. She was can’t-see-the-floor dirty. She was dishes-from-last-week-still-sitting-in-the-sink dirty.
As one might expect, Margaret and her mother did not get along. Well, they got along about some things, but not about this.
But what Margaret’s mother did not know – and what Margaret wished so deeply to tell her – was that Margaret’s dirtiness was about more than laziness. It was about self-preservation. No, more than that. It was about saving everyone. It was about keeping everyone safe.
Because Margaret’s mother did not know what Margaret knew. She did not know that monsters roamed the streets outside their house after dark. They sniffed and snorted outside their windows. They howled and growled outside their door. And, sometimes, they got in.
Margaret’s mother did not know this because she went to bed at a decent time. Margaret knew this because she liked to stay up reading.
The first time she met the monsters, she was eight, finally old enough to disobey her mother. She read under her sheets with a flashlight, ears peeled for sudden noises that might indicate her mother coming to check on her.
When she first heard the noise, she clicked the flashlight off and threw the book to the floor. Pressing her head against her pillow and struggling to calm her breathing, she waited for the light footsteps of her mother, for the door to creak open, for the scolding beratement.
But none of that came.
Instead, there was another noise. Louder. A crash.
Margaret could not help picturing her mother somewhere in the house, fallen.
She peeled herself from bed to do her daughterly duty of making sure her mother was okay.
But when she entered the hallway, no lights were on.
And when she entered the kitchen, her mother was not there.
“Mom,” she whispered, slightly embarrassed about the way her voice warbled.
She swung her flashlight in a searching scan.
She only saw it because its eyes glowed when her flashlight passed over it.
The monster did not move, and neither did she. They sized each other up.
The monster was spindly and hunched, searching the countertops with long, crooked claws. It did not look human at all. Except for its small, beady, yellow eyes, the creature was all mouth. It stuck its sticky lips to the countertop, and Margaret could not help squeaking in confusion.
In one impossible motion, the monster unhooked itself from the countertop, roared, exposed rows of horrifying teeth, and stumbled across the kitchen towards Margaret.
If Margaret were older, she may have fought it. Or yelled. Or done anything except what she did.
But Margaret was eight, so she ran. But she did not run anywhere that would have let her escape.
She ran to her room.
With the monster's rancid breath at her back, she crossed the threshold. She scanned the room for places to hide, breath hitching with despair.
She thought one discernable thought, I am going to die, so she closed her eyes and waited.
But the teeth did not touch her. The breath did not draw closer.
Margaret slowly slid one eye open.
The monster stood in her doorway. Not in. Right outside. It snarled in disgust. It seemed that the monster could hardly even bear to look at her. She saw the way its muscles quaked, fighting itself. She saw the way it seemed stopped by some invisible force.
And she saw that when the monster finally gave up, when it walked away, it left behind a dark and putrid residue where it had stood. It was the kind of thing that would have made her mother quake.
Her mother.
Margaret could not bear the thought of this creature finding her mother.
She knew, inevitably, what to do.
Because for the most part, dirty creatures recognize clean creatures and clean creatures recognize dirty creatures.
This monster was just like her mother, horrified by the state of her room, confused by the smells that seeped from it. This monster despised her dirt.
Margaret tore off her pajamas and put on rank clothes pulled from the floor. She grabbed an armful of what her mother called her “filth.” Objects from the floor. Trash, mostly.
She left her room calmly because she had brought her filth with her.
The monster was looming at her mother’s doorway, claw reaching out to the door handle.
Margaret barrelled towards it.
The creature shrank away, disturbed by the pile of dirt running its direction.
As she neared, it fled, terrified.
Margaret huffed and sighed, then smiled.
She softly opened her mother’s door, watching the sleeping form in the room.
“I will always protect you, Mom,” she whispered into the air.
It was a promise.
A promise to be what her mother hated if it meant loving her. If it meant keeping her safe, she would make her mother angry.
She placed her lips to her mother’s forehead.
In the morning, her mother complained of the dirt.
