The question is whether to move forward, backward, or to remain in place. The house would be the place but now that his father had died the house was a question. Dean had been in and out of it, back and forth, for the past few months. He’d fixed some things. A coat of paint here and there. At first in preparation for his father to come home. Later for himself. Later still just for something to do.
With death comes division. The body’s cells, alarm clocks ticking down. All property follows the body into division. Collected things get distributed to other houses, other relatives. There are the morbid Craigslist strangers, those death shoppers who flock to death sales. They are related to garage sale prowlers and trash-heap diggers. They come baring claws to fight over the dead’s things, assigning new ownership and purifying.
Better for strangers to take things. No one in the family wanted much. There wasn’t much to want and their own houses were full of their own lives. They wanted everything divided, discarded, broken up. They wanted the house sold away before the property bubble burst, which might happen very soon, they worried. The modest plaster box was worth several working lives and it was all wrong and it had to be sold.
