Kaylena Radcliff: 1 CNF
Home
Home was a transient thing, shifting from rentals to refinancing to foreclosures in our subrural Pennsylvanian town. The town seemed a shifting thing itself, springing up as a crossroads community on a swampy patch of earth and swallowing sweet little towns whole as it pleased. When we arrived, it had already outgrown its country charm, although you could still see its vestiges here and there. But the town had been greedy. It ballooned as it overindulged, coagulating into suburban purgatory along a fast-food infested stretch of highway that would make any capitalist worth his salt proud.
That’s where we squatted, my family and I, haunting various residential neighborhoods about the defunct train tracks and pretending each new front door opened to our forever home. We didn’t look back when we said goodbye. We didn’t look back at all when we slammed it closed for the last time. No, home was a transient thing, and when the pressure shattered the windows and steamed out under the doors, we left. My parents gathered up the pieces of themselves and promised this next move would be different. And maybe they believed it. There was always a chance things wouldn’t blow the hell up like they always did.
Wandering like vagrants through my childhood, we hung onto pipe dreams and pyramid schemes. Mom and Dad adhered to the process with scientific rigor, clinging to the precision in the timing and the surety of transition, as if the next house could stave off the crushing weight of their unrelenting debt and incendiary marriage. Mom painted rooms and Dad built handy things. They knocked down the dining room wall and put in shiny laminate floors. Still, behind the latest front door the pressure remained. It grew. It always grew. Our experiments filled each home with hydrogen; Mom and Dad brandished their lighters and showered sparks. Sometimes I put out the resulting eruptions. Sometimes I dropped a match in the middle.
I was shedding my adolescence before the final explosion. The air hung thick with noxious gases in that last forever home, belched out by its occupants behind the straining front door. We had flamethrowers by then too, piled high on the kitchen table and spilling over onto the new floors. You could find the pieces of my parents strewn all about, microscopic and scattered and too shredded to glue together, but what would it have mattered, anyway? Their promises finally rang hollow in their own ears. They had nowhere else to go.
Someone called an arbiter, and we kids waited. We pretended the armistice meant something.
By this time, I’d learned the lesson well. Home is a transient thing, you see, and the fumes were making me dizzy. I’d gotten it into my head that I could outpace the cascading chain reaction, that I could squat somewhere new. Some days I hunkered into my Oldsmobile and drove that massive, ugly boat of a car hard and fast. Some days I hit the edge of town and idled, staring out at the humid, rolling hills ahead. I know this sounds stupid, but I’d ask them things. Could they promise—if it was just me—would it be different? Or would it blow the hell up like it always did?
Not once did they have the courage to answer.
The car always found its way back to the bulging front door and sizzling window panes. I sucked in the hydrogen, of course. What did it matter anyway? I had nowhere else to go.
Kaylena Radcliff is a coffee drinker, author, and amateur geek. She has written various speculative and fantasy short stories, as well as the children's biography Torchlighters: Corrie ten Boom. She is also the author of the dystopian fantasy series, The Elmnas Chronicles, of which the second book is forthcoming. She lives in her hometown in Pennsylvania with her husband and two children. Find her on Instagram @kaylenaradcliff or on Facebook /kaylenaradcliff.