Day 28 – April 28 – Part 3 – NaShoStoMo Challenge – The House Jan Built

            The House Jan Built

On the corner of the street is a half-finished house. The bedroom, kitchen and bathroom has been built and whitewashed (for the most part), but the front of the house is only crude brick walls, marred by blobs of crumbling cement. The windows are empty, the frames blushing from accumulated rust. The frame where the front door should be is cracked and discoloured from the lack of varnish. A floor of cracked cement stretches to the hall door that has become the front door. The house number – eight six one – is painted in red on the flimsy door. In one corner of the unfinished living room a twenty litre tin of paint stands. It is also red with rust, but the paint inside have never seen a paint brush. That is how far the house was built on the day Jan’s wife died. That is how far the house is still.

The garden has not fared better. Knee-high grass and sticky weeds have taken over the small garden at the front of the house. The thick bushes that once served as a neat hedge, is overgrown or half smothered by weeds and decorated by litter from the street. It too hasn’t been trimmed in years. The one, small bed where a few vegetables were planted had long been forgotten and had disappeared between the weeds and grass. But then, Jan’s wife had been the one with green fingers.

Jan sits on a folding chair in the middle of the empty living room and stares at the clouds drifting closer from the west. A few teenagers walk past and try to see into the half-finished house. They quickly move on when they see the old man with his unshaven face and dark eyes sitting there watching the sky. A lady selling vegetables walks by without stopping at the house. A middle-aged man walks by humming a tune and throws an apple core into the garden without looking at the house or its occupant.

The old man turns his stare to the place where the core had fallen. He noted the bent blades of grass, the rain drops starting to fall and the call of a Hadeda in the distance. He lifts a plastic glass with wine in one hand and toasts his wife. “Five years today,” he murmurs and empties the glass with a few gulps. He gets up with a sigh, shuffles into the finished part of the house, lies down on the bed that has become too big for him, and listens to the rain until he falls asleep.