Now

My mother hunted, and her mother before her. In the ancient history of indoors, Great-Nana was a realtor. A taste for houses runs in my blood.

There persists a memory from childhood: someone giving me a rock, helping me pull my arm back and aim at the picture window of a ranch house. It was already in rough shape. Mangy with missing siding, roof swaybacked. We were by a lake’s edge. The water and window gleamed silver in the sun. The rock flew, not hard or far enough to punch the head-sized hole that appeared in the glass. But I thought the damage was done by me, and I was proud.

The kindly trickery of adults, training me for my future, was not so different from the arcane work of selling houses, as my mother explained it. To inhabit anything, the possibility of your presence there must first be conjured for you. You must picture the skin of what could be stretched over the bones of what is.

I remember the shadow of the ranch retreating across the grass, the shattering creaks as people ripped doors from hinges, tore molding off with crowbars. Through a puncture in the drywall, I watched a massive pink lung of insulation struggle, then stop. It was damp under my palm. I almost felt sorry.

Less sorry, later, sleep banished by the crawling sensation of having been inside. It lingered. I looked up at the stars, needle-sharp in the absence of moonlight, almost close enough to lick. The familiar, gentle spill of the Milky Way. It was awful to consider: the amputation of the sky overhead by a palisade of hacked-up wood.

We’d built fires with the day’s kill, returning to open air the materials that had been trapped in the house. By the glow of the embers, I could still see the others. Here we are, here we are, sang the red coals, the slumped shapes of my family. I thought about being separated from them by thick walls, and cried myself into dreams of being devoured, falling through a starving porch-mouth and sinking into a sticky carpeted pit.

Great-Nana lived in houses. She spoke often about when they turned on us. She was cooking dinner and the floor started to vibrate. The air in the kitchen went wrong. It tasted foul, raised her hackles. Then it flexed, pushing her right out the door like a rough hand. She stood blinking in the street with her neighbors, blue night descending. Everyone with shirts unbuttoned, pajamas on; an unlucky few in towels with soaking hair, cast out of suddenly scalding baths. Through the window, she saw her soup boiling into brown scum, foaming over the sides of the pot. Up and down the street, lights exploded in their sockets, appliances whirred into ecstatic death throes. Fridges spat torrents of water and ice. Radios whooped, guttering away to static. Door handles emitted nasty jolts. The stubbornest people tried to fight back inside anyway. For their efforts, they burned: a quick incandescence, like scraps of paper soaked in oil.

That was the first of it, Great-Nana told my mother. The worst was the sound that came later. Buildings ripping themselves up at the root, deafening scrape of concrete on brick on metal as their endless roaming began. The neighborhood, after, pocked with holes that whistled in the wind.

Did she ever miss inside, my mother had asked. In response, Great-Nana’s eyes shuttered with grief. It was hard for that generation to adapt. They were vulnerable, in just their thin skin and cloth. Accustomed to being contained, they tried to make do. Amateur experiments with cabins went awry. They bit: builders lost fingers, hands, whole arms. The unfinished constructions galloped away, were sighted traveling in misshapen herds. The people bargained: just three walls? Two, and a roof? Even between two walls, space turned threatening, began to crackle. Great-Nana took it all personally, died an exile, ground down by exposure. She was house-broken. She begged the others to bury her proper, in a pine box, but they laid her out in the usual far field, avoided looking until birds had taken most of her. Carpentry was impermissible. They could not build her that little deathroom, imprison her spirit, risk their limbs.

Great-Nana’s daughter had been born in a hospital, but she was very small when things changed. She grew up skipping across the plains, fearless around the maws of deserted foundations. My mother was born in the open world, her first sight the delicate shell of dawn above. Bodies learned the new ropes rapidly. Pelts thickened, grew downy and protective. Outside, the sense of self-space expanded, all the way to the horizon’s vanishing point. Caves, when necessary, were just barely tolerable: the overhang of rock made one itch, like the stump of a missing extremity.

It’s thrilling to be much, to be vast. To be together: we nestle, for warmth and the pleasure of contact, the briefest flirtation with boundaries. I stop here, there you start. We touch, we dance away when touching becomes too much like confinement.

And what of the houses? They are fewer, frailer, every year; they dilapidate, collapse with hunger. They keep their distance, nosing around the very perimeter of us. I feel some pity when encountering piles of stone and shingle, jagged timber ribs, in a lonely forest clearing. I remember the hunting parties of my youth, the joyful, feral din of group destruction. I could take down a Victorian single-handedly now, though I still have healthy fear. They need us: our breath to dampen their crumbling plaster, our hands to patch their wounds, our perception to shrink down to the size of their chambers. They regret. They want us reduced, domesticated. Give them an inch, and they’ll rip from us every mile of perspective we’ve earned. Even around their dead, I touch my bar of prying iron, test the quickness of my draw. It’s good to respect your prey.

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Lauren Artiles writes and teaches fiction. She holds an MFA in Writing from CalArts, and her work has been supported by a Vermont Studio Center Fellowship and the Mass Cultural Council. She lives in Massachusetts. Find Lauren at laurenartiles.com and @imaginaryfruits on IG.