In the following snippet, Keturah/Kettlecorn discusses her lifelong obsession with houses!
Johnson (YTA with bells on) initiates her deep dive into musings over a dollhouse which, we promise you, does not have meaning beyond the obvious. Bram is as disinterested as ever. But the ever-loyal Stig encourages the best of recollections...
“You know, Keturah, I’ve watched you. I’ve liked you. I’ve considered you as a partner. Yet all roads seem to lead to your nursing your mediocrity forever. You’re not really planning to make it big as an artist, are you? As far as I can see, you’re stuck: a hausfrau, content to wash socks and cacky arses. If you plan to spend your life running around that broken-down hovel you call a house, you can count me out. I’m not sticking around.” Johnson sat back in his chair, satisfied. Ball’s in your court.
We were horrified, as you can imagine, Stig, but not for the reason you might think. Consider our lifelong obsession. All we heard was that broken-down hovel you call a house, and we were incensed.
“A minute ago, the broken-down hovel you call a house was something in which you saw yourself revelling.”
Stig pricks up his ears. The rest of this story is familiar.
“Go ahead. I don’t think I’ll ever tire of your need to grind things into the ground.”
…..
We found the dollhouse abandoned by the side of the road. It’s almost a cliché. Many decades ago, we’d whined for a dollhouse, and one appeared for our third birthday. We know it’s not our imagination because there exists a photograph of us standing in front of it, clutching a rag doll. It was one of those typical Sixties toys, made of thin painted metal. We loved it.
“But what happened to it,” we asked Bram one day, while we sifted through an old photo album. We noticed several photos were missing; only the pasted corners remained.
“You’ve never mentioned a dollhouse,” said Bram. “Whatever it is you remember probably didn’t belong to you.”
He looked away quickly from the album with the empty spots. Not necessarily suspicious. What if he’d taken photos to make copies? Whatever we asked, though, there’d be a pat answer and a scowl.
“My sister had one of those houses, Keturah. They were dangerous. She cut her fingers on its sharp metal corners, and my parents tossed the thing out to protect her from seriously injuring herself. Maybe your folks did the same thing. Maybe they just wanted to protect you. Can you see that?”
There’s truth in that, we tell Stig.
But here’s proof that God exists. On an October night thick with darkness, we saw the dollhouse glowing by the side of the road.
“That’s dramatic,” says Stig. “Anything on an October night gets me.”
“I said it was glowing.”
“That’s icing on the cake, Keturah - Kettlecorn, that is. Prithee, continue.”
We can see that it’s roughly hewn, homemade, perhaps with earnestness but certainly without skill or refinement. We decide it’s worth it to wheel it home – it’s on casters, of all things – and give it a coat of black spray paint to Goth it up. You can see, now, why we mentioned that it was an October night, thick with darkness. We were brimming with cleverness, the sort that only a Gothic haunted dollhouse replete with cobwebs and Dollarama skeletons can realise.
“Not really the thing for which you were pining and hoping, though.”
“That, dear Stig, is the point. We don’t get the dream house, the beautiful heirloom, the grandpa-crafted Victorian. We don’t get exactly what we want. Our blessings are always a little bit different. We get the dollhouse, and we get it in the fullness of time, at sixty-four, not four. But the dollhouse is ours. It is not a beauty. It is filthy. It was kicked to the curb, covered with mice droppings. But the blessing is that if we want to make the effort to rescue what God intends for us to have, we can call it a gift.
We suppose it would have been easier to leave the blessed thing by the side of the road. It wasn’t the kind of thing that would have been snatched up, but we would have regretted bypassing potential. For us, it’s always potential. A beautiful thrift shop dress, three sizes too big, will appear before us. Or a rummage sale purse in a screaming orange. The potential is irresistible when it’s that or nothing.
We’re not intent on making the dollhouse a symbol of real life, so please get that furrow out of your brow. We’re not spray-painting it and throwing it back to the streets, either. We’re going to give it what it needs, we’re going to realise its God-given potential that it always deserved. We’re going to elevate the thing and make it into something far better than what we would have done with a more elegant gift. And here, Stig, lies the true blessing. It is what you understand but few – certainly not Bram - do. We can do anything. We get few instances of instant gratification, but even though we come by the thorn road, so to speak, we get the reward.”
.....excerpted from YTA, that NaNoWriMo sensation you didn't know you needed to read until just about now. All rights reserved, copyright, 2023, A. G. Duffy/Rat Under Paper
