LA KAY

The House settled into a coma and waited to die. Something was holding It back. Something was holding It up. Its slumping aluminum siding, Its weakened steel frame, the crushed remnants of Lucien’s hoarding: junk appliances stacked from the basement floor to Its ceiling, the same on the ground floor, more in the upstairs bedrooms all the way to the roof. Something wouldn’t let La Kay die. Something inside wanted to survive Its suicide attempt. There were only two things It loved enough to live for—children and music—and It hadn’t heard a whisper of either in a very long time. As far as It could feel, neither was present after the fire. It hurt so badly to think of life after. It knew that It was now uninhabitable. It also knew that Lucien’s standards were low. He’d regularly slept in his trash dump of a van. But the smell of burned things, the wetness of fabrics turning musty and moldy, the crumbling floors and ceilings, would surely keep him away, unless he was being drawn in by someone or something inside.

La Kay wanted to get into his mind. It had done it before, outsmarted him and won. It wanted him to come back so It could find out what he knew, what had made him plead to be let back in, to risk being burned or buried alive. If It had to live while waiting to be demolished, It wanted to, at least, toy with Its nemesis and, perhaps, get him to kill himself.

It didn’t care what Its neighbors thought. Their condescension, fear, and pity were of no consequence. It didn’t give a damn if, like their owners, they wanted It torn down. It didn’t give a single golden fuck what It looked like to them after the fire. Boarded up, KEEP OUT signs posted all over, spray-painted with graffiti by hood vandals or artists. It was way past the point of caring about anything, even music and children almost. It just wanted to collapse and let the demolition team end it all. But It wanted Lucien to come back inside and suffer the same.

He’s the one who’d brought It to this point. He deserved to pay for inflicting so much pain on all Its occupants. He didn’t deserve a second or third chance, a new life somewhere else. The misdeeds La Kay had witnessed warranted incarceration in the bowels of a crumbling building where his remains would mix in and be discarded with the decades of debris he’d collected. He deserved to be scooped up and dropped into a metal trash bin, indecipherable from the rest of his garbage. La Kay held firm to Its belief that he needed to be dismembered alive by Its broken windowpanes, crushed to death by Its sandwiched ceilings, and pressed into a junk pile while his mind remained alive to witness his own demise.

It had plans for Lucien, one final coup before resigning Itself to an undeserved death that would also be a well-earned rest.