That Salmon House
That Salmon House
Theresa’s bag boxed the bed, and with a tired stroll she cleaved her window to let the cool pre-autumn air breathe into the room. There was only one window, resting silently on the face of the wall opposite the door. Her bed crawled into the space against the wall left of the window, and slumbered in a dark green blanket. It nearly stretched from the window to the door in the small room.
A desk occupied the space parallel, seeming almost garish in the modest design that occupied that room. An electric piano cuddled close to the cheek of the desk, mothering a stool that stayed below it like a newborn child. The only other volume in the room was Theresa, now intertwined with the curves of her slumbering giant. She listened to the air whispering softly into her compact palace. School isn’t ever something that left you ‘rejuvenated.’
Her face impregnated its own image onto her pillow, the right side pressing itself into the pillow’s body while the left side felt the cool breeze waft around her space and settle to warm up again. She flipped up and around, trying to find a comfortable position after putting it off for the last few minutes.
There wasn’t a hurry to do much. Theresa knew the window wouldn’t come into use for another thirty minutes or so because her neighbor always was out getting food, presents or just out, driving around and being loud. Her neighbor always had a way of treating the world like that when her peers were around. Always one more thing to do: a party, a race, social interactions and reputation tune-ups to keep her after school a little while. Theresa knew it was a pity.
She retrieved her qwerty pad and ventured to her desktop. Her behind plopped into the desk chair, and she spun once around before catching herself in the mitt of the opposite side. Theresa was tired of being tired. She traced the lined from the qwerty pad and found the end, forming a male piece. Searching for the female input, she thumbed around the hardware concealing itself near her legs.
She squished the two together, somewhat laughing at the fact that she probably could have courted the female end before making everything workout between them. Pressing the power button blared a synthetic orchestra to symbolize the awakening of this astonishing piece of machinery. Theresa had awakened this beast long enough to ignore it.
She started her homework promptly, not turning on any music for fear she would miss the entrance of her neighbor. Still she worked diligently, finishing assignment after assignment. Starting with the boring matter, like calculus and the more tedious part of her physics class, she went through it. She worked hard enough to have more than half of it done before her neighbor finally got home.
A car door met its body with a slam, and Theresa froze to hear more. The hard sounds of laughs and high decibel statements filled the air. She was home. A wooden door then followed closely, followed by silence. Theresa slid over to the window and looked out.
Theresa’s house was blue, like the blue in a newborn’s eyes in the first week of life. Her window overlooked two patches of green separated by a fence, leading up to her neighbor’s house, which was coated in a layer of salmon-like pink paint. She could see directly into her neighbor’s room, but she hardly looked in. Theresa listened, because both of their windows were always open and she was quiet enough to hear the sounds from that salmon house.
Another door opened, this time the one to her neighbor’s bedroom. Two people entered stage right, and Theresa went back to her computer, comfortable in the fact that she knew her neighbor was home, and could listen to the smut that her neighbor spat out of her lips. The smut Theresa knew her neighbor covered herself in.
“O. M. G. Alexis,” the first girl giggled between fits of unbridled and undeserved laughter, “I can’t, like even believe you and Derek have been going out for, like, so long now! Almost, like, an entire two months!” More high-velocity laughter moved around like gunshots fired from an automatic assault rifle. Theresa wasn’t sure who the other girl was, but Alexis was, in Theresa’s mind, laughing with her hand over her mouth in her signature I-am-sorry-I-look-perfect or I-am-sorry-I-get-everything kind of way.
“We’re pretty serious,” Alexis laughed. “He’s so nice, and so hot!”
“Are you going to go all the way with him when your parents aren’t home Friday?”
Theresa had to think. It was Wednesday today. Two more days, then. She knew one thing though: Alexis would probably bail. Theresa had lived next to her for about three years, and knew her almost better than anyone else did, even though Alexis never really acknowledged her existence more than a few times, and even then to give her a strange look when she wore something that didn’t quite match.
It was a strange feeling of satisfaction for Theresa to know that she would probably bail. Alexis was the kind of girl that knew she was beautiful, and knew that it was a trait of the people with beautiful faces to have everything handed to them, and to have everything taken for granted taken for granted. She was the most perfect mixture of internal and external traits: beautiful, smart and gracefully clever.
Alexis knew that her social click has money, but with each other, they had sex; everyone with everyone, whether or not it was a relationship lasting several years or several glances at each other from each end of a large room. Alexis was not that kind of girl, and knew that as well. She would make up her own excuses, double-book herself purposefully, and even go to the library and turn off her phone if necessary. She could get out of it and still make people think that she has loads of sex. Alexis was clever.
Theresa listened for about another hour, and in fact it was hard not to. Not only in volume, but in subject matter. It was everything anyone could ever hope for. The most disgusting kind of perfect things you had to talk about to be accepted. All the sex, all the celebrities, all the cheerleaders and football teams, how the band was filled with freaks and how that one girl broke down in room 4E because her boyfriend had left her right before third period.
It was after the .50 caliber bullets filled with insults and opinions left the holes in the walls and cooled down to the point that human hands could touch them that her friend left. Theresa stopped playing her computer game to listen. This was her favorite part: a tossup to doing anything. She could keep going with her social career and call up her continuance, fall asleep, start her homework, or do Theresa’s favorite: playing the viola she kept hidden underneath her bed under lock and key.
Theresa’s ears burned as if the mere anticipation for the sound of the jingle of the keys made them combust and engulf with each continuing second. Music had started playing loftily, but not coming from a viola. Alexis had put in a CD and started playing it from her larger-than-life computer speakers. It was rock music, harder than usual, so it may have been a CD she had asked her friend to borrow, because that’s what her friends do. She had to listen to all of the tracks, pick the one everyone hated the most, and bully it until her friends believed her.
It was like that for a while, listening to a few songs twice, determining the favorite of the worst to hate. The computer had gotten boring for Theresa, so she only lay on her bed, reading a few books and throwing a tennis ball against the door. It all lasted about two hours, hitting the time where eating was vital, and the door shut on Alexis’ end.
Theresa went downstairs and retrieved herself some noodles with cheese slathered all over them and reverted herself to the small room on the second floor. When the door clasped behind her, she noticed the lights off in Alexis’ room. The window had closed on that salmon house, and Alexis must have been asleep. The noodles relocated into a cozy new stomach, and Theresa hit the hay. She was thinking about Friday.
The next school day passed very, very as equally as bad as the previous one. Theresa still came home, tired as always. Her bag face-planted the bed as she walked over and let the same breeze wallow and settle on her bedroom. Upon that salmon house, the window wasn't ajar. She intertwined herself with the giant, and accidentally drifted off.
When she awoke, about an hour had passed. Two legs swivelled out as she erected herself to the frame of her window. Alexis' window was still closed. Theresa pondered up a few explinations for herself: a party at someone else's house, a road trip, or some other kind of social outlet that might take all day and night. Whatever the cause, that window was still closed.
To Theresa, there wasn't any point in waiting. She plopped back down onto her bed and extended her back across it's body. No games right now, no homework, so she opted to work on a piano piece she had been working on. She landed in that swivelling office chair and bladed it from her desk to that small electric piano. A switch bred a back-lighed sepia screen that read: "Grand Piano".
She reached to her right and retrieved a small stack of notation paper from the farthest left-hand drawer of her desk. She stood it on the plastic lattice backing of the piano, and repositioned herself. Fingers were in position and all the keys fit together just as they always have.
She began playing a beautiful melody, note after note of arpeggios and passing tones, of sevenths and flowing chords and progressions; so beautiful that philanthropists may have cited it. She had a pencil in hand, making corrections to her own music. She addad new phrases and melodies, counter-melodies and accents galore.
She worked for maybe two hours: flowing and moving and playing what her human heart could take. She grew tired of dynamics and eventually retired her marked-and-erased papers. The switched flipped again and the screen faded black, followed closely by the vacancy of that swivelling chair. She walked to the window and froze.
Only two things had changed: the angle of the sunlight on that salmon house and the position of the window. Alexis' window stood ajar like the ear of an eavesdropper. Theresa knew she was in there. Nobody else would have dared touch anything in there without her permission. Theresa quickly slammed the window down and grew red-faced. She was half flattered and half embarrassed and half angry.
Her mind shot off like a gun. Alexis doesn't notice me ever, she has hardly ever talked to me. Does she think I am good? Why did she have to listen? Does this change anything? Will she talk to me tomorrow? What, why? How? Will she, won't she? It all seemed like too much. Theresa just sprawled out and though until the thoughts became feelings and the feelings became worries and the worries became so large that she fell asleep from exhaustion.
The morning was hesitant, but she knew she had to go anyway. Alexis would be there, along with all the intangible worry. All the while to school she thought and thought. She led a hesitant swagger through the front doors and the halls. Attendance was taken before she began to wonder a single bit about school.
She only noticed Alexis' car, so in was indubidable that she was in school. Theresa didn't see her one though, perhaps because she was taking different hallways than she knew Alexis took. Yet with a long half-felt avail the end bell struck, and school was over. Back home as fast as she could go, Theresa reached her room and opened the window. She lied on her bed and waited. She didn't know what would happen, but the music made it different somehow.
She didn't have to wait long, because soon she heard the car door. The voices were hushed today, but Theresa knew Alexis was with someone. There was a little sigh of relief on her part, based solely on the fact that this particular turn of events could only prolong her uncontrollable use of procrastination. The door opened for the house, and then for Alexis' room. She heard two voices, but something was different. Something forgotten.
It was Friday.
Theresa's skin bumped up like a braille dictionary, knowing that the other person was Derek. She heard that kind of laughing, the kind coming from the feigned Juliet and the aroused Romeo, and the springs of the bed screaming with the new feeling of a two-body compression. Theresa felt a lump in her chest, one of disappointment and a slight lick of regret. As hard as she could try, she slowly closed her own window and drowned out any screaming spring with some music.
Theresa cried over Alexis that night, thinking about that viola with it's beautiful melodies. Thinking of the was Alexis heard the piano and her own renaissance piano notes. Thinking of how she knew Alexis more than anyone else, even Derek. Especially Derek. Theresa had closed the window on that salmon house.
A desk occupied the space parallel, seeming almost garish in the modest design that occupied that room. An electric piano cuddled close to the cheek of the desk, mothering a stool that stayed below it like a newborn child. The only other volume in the room was Theresa, now intertwined with the curves of her slumbering giant. She listened to the air whispering softly into her compact palace. School isn’t ever something that left you ‘rejuvenated.’
Her face impregnated its own image onto her pillow, the right side pressing itself into the pillow’s body while the left side felt the cool breeze waft around her space and settle to warm up again. She flipped up and around, trying to find a comfortable position after putting it off for the last few minutes.
There wasn’t a hurry to do much. Theresa knew the window wouldn’t come into use for another thirty minutes or so because her neighbor always was out getting food, presents or just out, driving around and being loud. Her neighbor always had a way of treating the world like that when her peers were around. Always one more thing to do: a party, a race, social interactions and reputation tune-ups to keep her after school a little while. Theresa knew it was a pity.
She retrieved her qwerty pad and ventured to her desktop. Her behind plopped into the desk chair, and she spun once around before catching herself in the mitt of the opposite side. Theresa was tired of being tired. She traced the lined from the qwerty pad and found the end, forming a male piece. Searching for the female input, she thumbed around the hardware concealing itself near her legs.
She squished the two together, somewhat laughing at the fact that she probably could have courted the female end before making everything workout between them. Pressing the power button blared a synthetic orchestra to symbolize the awakening of this astonishing piece of machinery. Theresa had awakened this beast long enough to ignore it.
She started her homework promptly, not turning on any music for fear she would miss the entrance of her neighbor. Still she worked diligently, finishing assignment after assignment. Starting with the boring matter, like calculus and the more tedious part of her physics class, she went through it. She worked hard enough to have more than half of it done before her neighbor finally got home.
A car door met its body with a slam, and Theresa froze to hear more. The hard sounds of laughs and high decibel statements filled the air. She was home. A wooden door then followed closely, followed by silence. Theresa slid over to the window and looked out.
Theresa’s house was blue, like the blue in a newborn’s eyes in the first week of life. Her window overlooked two patches of green separated by a fence, leading up to her neighbor’s house, which was coated in a layer of salmon-like pink paint. She could see directly into her neighbor’s room, but she hardly looked in. Theresa listened, because both of their windows were always open and she was quiet enough to hear the sounds from that salmon house.
Another door opened, this time the one to her neighbor’s bedroom. Two people entered stage right, and Theresa went back to her computer, comfortable in the fact that she knew her neighbor was home, and could listen to the smut that her neighbor spat out of her lips. The smut Theresa knew her neighbor covered herself in.
“O. M. G. Alexis,” the first girl giggled between fits of unbridled and undeserved laughter, “I can’t, like even believe you and Derek have been going out for, like, so long now! Almost, like, an entire two months!” More high-velocity laughter moved around like gunshots fired from an automatic assault rifle. Theresa wasn’t sure who the other girl was, but Alexis was, in Theresa’s mind, laughing with her hand over her mouth in her signature I-am-sorry-I-look-perfect or I-am-sorry-I-get-everything kind of way.
“We’re pretty serious,” Alexis laughed. “He’s so nice, and so hot!”
“Are you going to go all the way with him when your parents aren’t home Friday?”
Theresa had to think. It was Wednesday today. Two more days, then. She knew one thing though: Alexis would probably bail. Theresa had lived next to her for about three years, and knew her almost better than anyone else did, even though Alexis never really acknowledged her existence more than a few times, and even then to give her a strange look when she wore something that didn’t quite match.
It was a strange feeling of satisfaction for Theresa to know that she would probably bail. Alexis was the kind of girl that knew she was beautiful, and knew that it was a trait of the people with beautiful faces to have everything handed to them, and to have everything taken for granted taken for granted. She was the most perfect mixture of internal and external traits: beautiful, smart and gracefully clever.
Alexis knew that her social click has money, but with each other, they had sex; everyone with everyone, whether or not it was a relationship lasting several years or several glances at each other from each end of a large room. Alexis was not that kind of girl, and knew that as well. She would make up her own excuses, double-book herself purposefully, and even go to the library and turn off her phone if necessary. She could get out of it and still make people think that she has loads of sex. Alexis was clever.
Theresa listened for about another hour, and in fact it was hard not to. Not only in volume, but in subject matter. It was everything anyone could ever hope for. The most disgusting kind of perfect things you had to talk about to be accepted. All the sex, all the celebrities, all the cheerleaders and football teams, how the band was filled with freaks and how that one girl broke down in room 4E because her boyfriend had left her right before third period.
It was after the .50 caliber bullets filled with insults and opinions left the holes in the walls and cooled down to the point that human hands could touch them that her friend left. Theresa stopped playing her computer game to listen. This was her favorite part: a tossup to doing anything. She could keep going with her social career and call up her continuance, fall asleep, start her homework, or do Theresa’s favorite: playing the viola she kept hidden underneath her bed under lock and key.
Theresa’s ears burned as if the mere anticipation for the sound of the jingle of the keys made them combust and engulf with each continuing second. Music had started playing loftily, but not coming from a viola. Alexis had put in a CD and started playing it from her larger-than-life computer speakers. It was rock music, harder than usual, so it may have been a CD she had asked her friend to borrow, because that’s what her friends do. She had to listen to all of the tracks, pick the one everyone hated the most, and bully it until her friends believed her.
It was like that for a while, listening to a few songs twice, determining the favorite of the worst to hate. The computer had gotten boring for Theresa, so she only lay on her bed, reading a few books and throwing a tennis ball against the door. It all lasted about two hours, hitting the time where eating was vital, and the door shut on Alexis’ end.
Theresa went downstairs and retrieved herself some noodles with cheese slathered all over them and reverted herself to the small room on the second floor. When the door clasped behind her, she noticed the lights off in Alexis’ room. The window had closed on that salmon house, and Alexis must have been asleep. The noodles relocated into a cozy new stomach, and Theresa hit the hay. She was thinking about Friday.
The next school day passed very, very as equally as bad as the previous one. Theresa still came home, tired as always. Her bag face-planted the bed as she walked over and let the same breeze wallow and settle on her bedroom. Upon that salmon house, the window wasn't ajar. She intertwined herself with the giant, and accidentally drifted off.
When she awoke, about an hour had passed. Two legs swivelled out as she erected herself to the frame of her window. Alexis' window was still closed. Theresa pondered up a few explinations for herself: a party at someone else's house, a road trip, or some other kind of social outlet that might take all day and night. Whatever the cause, that window was still closed.
To Theresa, there wasn't any point in waiting. She plopped back down onto her bed and extended her back across it's body. No games right now, no homework, so she opted to work on a piano piece she had been working on. She landed in that swivelling office chair and bladed it from her desk to that small electric piano. A switch bred a back-lighed sepia screen that read: "Grand Piano".
She reached to her right and retrieved a small stack of notation paper from the farthest left-hand drawer of her desk. She stood it on the plastic lattice backing of the piano, and repositioned herself. Fingers were in position and all the keys fit together just as they always have.
She began playing a beautiful melody, note after note of arpeggios and passing tones, of sevenths and flowing chords and progressions; so beautiful that philanthropists may have cited it. She had a pencil in hand, making corrections to her own music. She addad new phrases and melodies, counter-melodies and accents galore.
She worked for maybe two hours: flowing and moving and playing what her human heart could take. She grew tired of dynamics and eventually retired her marked-and-erased papers. The switched flipped again and the screen faded black, followed closely by the vacancy of that swivelling chair. She walked to the window and froze.
Only two things had changed: the angle of the sunlight on that salmon house and the position of the window. Alexis' window stood ajar like the ear of an eavesdropper. Theresa knew she was in there. Nobody else would have dared touch anything in there without her permission. Theresa quickly slammed the window down and grew red-faced. She was half flattered and half embarrassed and half angry.
Her mind shot off like a gun. Alexis doesn't notice me ever, she has hardly ever talked to me. Does she think I am good? Why did she have to listen? Does this change anything? Will she talk to me tomorrow? What, why? How? Will she, won't she? It all seemed like too much. Theresa just sprawled out and though until the thoughts became feelings and the feelings became worries and the worries became so large that she fell asleep from exhaustion.
The morning was hesitant, but she knew she had to go anyway. Alexis would be there, along with all the intangible worry. All the while to school she thought and thought. She led a hesitant swagger through the front doors and the halls. Attendance was taken before she began to wonder a single bit about school.
She only noticed Alexis' car, so in was indubidable that she was in school. Theresa didn't see her one though, perhaps because she was taking different hallways than she knew Alexis took. Yet with a long half-felt avail the end bell struck, and school was over. Back home as fast as she could go, Theresa reached her room and opened the window. She lied on her bed and waited. She didn't know what would happen, but the music made it different somehow.
She didn't have to wait long, because soon she heard the car door. The voices were hushed today, but Theresa knew Alexis was with someone. There was a little sigh of relief on her part, based solely on the fact that this particular turn of events could only prolong her uncontrollable use of procrastination. The door opened for the house, and then for Alexis' room. She heard two voices, but something was different. Something forgotten.
It was Friday.
Theresa's skin bumped up like a braille dictionary, knowing that the other person was Derek. She heard that kind of laughing, the kind coming from the feigned Juliet and the aroused Romeo, and the springs of the bed screaming with the new feeling of a two-body compression. Theresa felt a lump in her chest, one of disappointment and a slight lick of regret. As hard as she could try, she slowly closed her own window and drowned out any screaming spring with some music.
Theresa cried over Alexis that night, thinking about that viola with it's beautiful melodies. Thinking of the was Alexis heard the piano and her own renaissance piano notes. Thinking of how she knew Alexis more than anyone else, even Derek. Especially Derek. Theresa had closed the window on that salmon house.