m a t t    r i t t e n h o u s e

The World That You Find Yourself A Part Of
 

You’re there ironing a shirt for your boyfriend. He’s got a job interview the next day and this is one of the small ways that you can show your love for him, so you’re there ironing his shirt but you don’t even really know if he wants the thing ironed you’re thinking: Should I be doing this? Will he even notice that I did this? And then the lights dim as if someone has walked in front of them. You’re at the end of a hallway, the room you’re in, and the lights dim and then they dim more and down the hallway there’s a whale, mouth open tilting and pulling into its stomach everything in its way. The air hasn’t turned to water and your lungs are not being poured into by the weight of its miles above you, but there is suddenly a whale crashing its way around.

The door frames are blown out by its bulk suddenly between them and it’s trying to move its body in the same manner that it would in the ocean, with the water around it holding it up in a way that up here in your house the air doesn’t hold anything up.

There’s a bookcase with pictures of you and your boyfriend on it-at your birthday, driving go karts- there are the books in the bookcase, there’s the backpack you just bought to hold your books because you’re going to go to college to become a nurse finally, these things, are crushed and strewn about in pieces.

It’s struggling in its new solid confines, the world suddenly unknowable and strange.

Guessing by the wide look in its giant-in-your-home eyes it's just as surprised as you to find itself here. Your things are draped about its fins: clothes and sticks of broken furniture, the sheets of the bed. Things are caught in and trail from its flexible whale teeth. It cracks its body in instant panicked movements that push through the walls.

There’s more crashing and shaking below you and when the whale at the end of the hallway stops struggling to take its hollow giant breaths downstairs you can hear the windows struck and the cabinets with dishes falling from the struggles of another. As if these two whales were just moments ago swimming together in their careless ‘I know you’re right there and will be for some time because there is so much ocean around us and unless we really try we’re not going to lose each other’ way, and the next thing that happens is that all of that water is replaced by all of these solid walls and bright lights and another creature so much smaller than them.

There’s a whale trying to swim down the hallway at you, there ironing. Your boyfriend who you know you love but know doesn’t love you isn’t there to tell you whether or not it’s actually a whale that’s scraping against the walls, its tail wedged in strange angles, or something else entirely.

You’re in the situation and there’s nothing you can do, really. You can’t airlift them out and you can’t make your place an ocean. Eventually they won’t drown in an opposite way to the way that you would drown, but their organs will crush and their blood will pool. They’ll stop panicking in the way that animals do when their energy gives out, just a big movement now and again, but slowing until you can feel all of that terror move to inside of them somewhere, compressed and then gone when they give up, sure that as much as they’d like to be in the water moving with grace, calling out in their haunting way to friends and lovers, they are not, and their ability to imagine the geometry that would move them into the world that they desire is too limited to effect their position in your house, with you there ironing at the end of the hallway hearing the joists crack and the floor crush.

 

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MATT RITTENHOUSE lives in Manchester, NH, for the time being, with one to two dogs depending on the week. He has had some fiction published elsewhere in elimae, Quick Fiction and Madswirl but is nil on the book front.

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