PodCastle 458: Home is a House That Loves You (Artemis Rising) - a podcast by Escape Artists, Inc

* Author : Rachael K. Jones

* Narrator : Kate Baker

* Host : Khaalidah Muhammad-Ali

* Audio Producer : Peter Wood

*

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PodCastle 458: Home is a House That Loves You (Artemis Rising) is a PodCastle original.





Welcome back to Artemis Rising 3!

Home is a House That Loves You

by Rachael K. Jones

Before the war with Apsides, I wanted to be like my Aunt Martha, who at the age of forty five stepped into an abandoned lot near Aurora’s city center, buried her toes in dirt, stretched up her arms, and became a skyscraper. Her legs were steel girders, earthquake-strong, her fingers long iron spires that caught pigeons and kites. Aunt Martha, 101 floors tall, sides aglitter with splendid floor-to-ceiling windows, family’s pride, city’s pride. When I was sixteen, I’d race up her stairwells whenever we visited, trailing fingers along her textured oak banisters up through offices and ballrooms and apartments of Martha’s design that hummed like beehives and smelled of Sumatran coffee. Martha would creak and shift and whisper back, and I knew she remembered me.



Martha was the first in my family to become a skyscraper. Mostly we became ordinary buildings. Service ran in my family. When our time came to take root, we usually carried on our lifelong vocations. My surgeon great-grandmother became the new cancer wing at the Aurora hospital, and Uncle Bert, who loved pickup basketball on the street at summer, transformed into the elementary school gymnasium when the old one grew too old to repair herself any longer.

My grandfather seized upon my pride in Aunt Martha and reflected it back as resentment. He kicked steel-toed factory boots against her red brick foundation, thumped on her drywall, grey eyes scanning and probing her structure for flaws. But he turned up nothing worth criticizing. Martha was perfection, an architectural marvel, a monument to define the horizon’s boundaries for future generations. So he made up his own reasons to hate her. “Forty-five is too young to take root. Cat and Graham aren’t even eighteen yet.”

My father cupped an arm around five-year-old Graham’s shoulder and steered him down one of Martha’s grand cobblestone courtyards to muffle out the adult talk. “I think I saw a lizard crawl beneath the picnic table,” he said. Graham’s tears ran to hiccups. The little boy squatted down, lost to his search.

Cat, though, glowered at Grandfather, her hands twined like ivy through the fantastic brass scrollwork of her mother’s fire escapes. She had caught them saying her name, and hadn’t overlooked the slur against her mother. “That’s ridiculous,” she called after them. “Uncle Bert took root even younger.”

“Bert was sick,” Grandfather said. He returned Cat’s pointed look. He didn’t like us to bring up Uncle Bert. It was still a sensitive topic, a tooth that ached when storms blew in from the far-off ocean. When he got his diagnosis, Bert marched down to City Planning and volunteered his body to take root where needed. “Martha could have waited a few more years at least. She’s all those kids had left. Selfish woman.”

Cat pulled her stocking cap over her eyebrows to shield her from Grandfather’s angry eyes. The adults moved on to dividing up Aunt Martha’s estate.

“Those kids can’t live in the house alone,” said Grandfather.

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