THE HOUSE THAT NOBODY LOVED

They lasted thirty-six hours.

Sunday afternoon

Lana had not expected the house to still have furniture. It made for some interesting talk about where to put everything from the truck. Except for bedroom and kitchen items, they tucked away most of the boxes and remaining furniture into a corner of the living room. Lana kept quiet about how incredibly messy the downstairs was. There was clutter everywhere. The house had a musty, not-lived-in-for-a-long-time smell throughout. Upstairs, Millie, their cat, sneezed once and then again.

Lana looked around, noticing the papers, boxes, books, clothes, knickknacks, and bags filled with stuff cluttered on every table and chair. Piles of paper and clothes were just tossed around the room. The piles of stuff formed a pathway leading to the kitchen. She had to watch her step because of the extension cords running across the pathway, disappearing into knee-high piles of clutter. Lana couldn't tell if anything had been connected to the extension cords. She didn’t see any space heaters or fans unless they were hiding under something.

One table looked like it was about to fall over from the weight of things piled on its surface. Boxes of moldy paper, envelopes crammed with more paper, books with cracked spines. There were layers of dust and old cobwebs everywhere she looked. Every flat surface had something on it. This is a hoarder house, Lana thought.

The kitchen needed serious cleaning up before cooking would even be possible. The bathroom wasn’t in much better shape.

They would need to clean out the tub, sink, and toilet before taking showers. It seemed like time had come to a standstill in the house when Mitch’s grandmother went to the nursing home.

Lana had seen nothing like it before. She had heard of hoarder houses but had never been inside one. “I thought Kristy and Mary drove in from time to time to look in,” she said.

Mitch’s father, Bob, said his sisters didn’t enjoy driving into the city because of the crime and had only looked in on the house two or three times since their mother had entered the nursing home.

Lana wondered how often Virginia’s grown children visited her in the nursing home. Why didn’t they sell the house? Lana and Mitch exchanged looks, and Mitch shook his head. He would explain later.

Sunday evening

The couple turned in the truck at the U-Haul place. Mitch’s parents took them out to dinner and then grocery shopping. Everyone was tired, and Lana figured they could start the serious cleaning the next morning. They had all the time in the world to make this house their home. For now, they could at least tidy up the kitchen and bathroom. The rest of the house could wait.

As Lana was putting the non-perishable things away, she noticed mice turds in the kitchen cabinets and along the countertops and baseboards. She pointed them out to Mitch and realized the smell in the kitchen was from the mice. Lana wondered if there were any nests or, worse, dead mice somewhere.

“We’ll have to set out traps or let Millie loose down here,” Mitch said. “Keep everything in the grocery bags for now or stash it in the fridge.

Lana wiped down all the shelves in the cabinets. If there were mice, there would be roaches as well. The last thing she wanted to see was roaches.

Lana noticed a large, ornate urn sitting in a corner of the kitchen. Once upon a time, it would have been pretty. It was filled with layers of dirt and dust and looked like a few inches of mice droppings at the bottom. Lana tried not to make a face and filled it with soapy, hot water. Maybe with some good old-fashioned elbow grease, she could get it cleaned up.

Mitch came into the kitchen with a box of silverware. “This was in a corner. I doubt any of them are usable. Looks like it could be genuine silver, so it’ll need polishing.”

Lana looked in the box and shook her head. The silver looked beyond help. The more they cleaned, the more she tried to understand how the house had gotten into the condition it was in. And she was wondering how long Mitch’s grandmother had lived there alone. How could her own children let her live like this?

Early Monday morning, 1 am

It was getting late. Millie was in one bedroom, fixed up with her cat bed and litter box. She glanced at them as if to say, “Y’all! all the new things to sniff! I hear things in the walls! I found a scrap of material to play with! Thank you!”

Lana and Mitch flopped onto the bed and chatted for a while, making plans for cleaning the next day. It was well past two am before they went to sleep.

Noises woke Lana two hours later. Chitters and scraping noises—animal-like sounds. They were coming from inside the house. She poked Mitch awake. “Do you hear that? Where’s it coming from? That’s too loud to be mice.”

“Sounds like squirrels. Let’s go see.”

Upstairs held three bedrooms and a small room that was more like a huge walk-in closet. The animal noises were coming from there. Turning on the light, they saw a gaping hole in the ceiling. Millie was sitting on the floor with rapt attention, making the chittering noises that cats make when they see a bird or some other small animal.

Mitch aimed a flashlight into the hole. “We’ll need to have the roof repaired, but there’s not much we can do about it right now. Let’s go back to sleep and finish cleaning up tomorrow.”

Monday, mid morning

A few hours later, and somewhat rested, the couple went downstairs to make coffee and breakfast. Lana let out a yelp when she opened a cabinet that she had cleaned the day before. There were mouse turds everywhere. They were in every cabinet, and there was a fresh layer on the counter and the baseboards. It looked like the mice were hosting grand parties every night. Was there a dead mouse or food somewhere? The smell was stronger than the night before.

“Dear,” Lana said, “This is beyond gross.” Mitch looked over the kitchen and sighed. “Yea. True. Everything goes in the fridge. Millie can have the run of the house for now. She loves chasing anything that moves.”

They cleaned up the bathroom, enough to make it usable, although Lana thought she smelled a faint sewer smell from the toilet. She made a mental note to ask Mitch about it later. They spent the next hour cleaning up the kitchen as best they could and picked the downstairs hallway as a starting point to clean up and gather trash.

In the downstairs hallway was another pathway made of boxes and bags that stretched from the stairs and extended to the back of the house. Lana sat on the stairs, going through various bits and pieces of paper and other items. There was clutter everywhere.

Piles of papers, clothes, boxes, and bags were crammed on top of each other. To the right of the front door was another pile of boxes and bags. As Lana moved the boxes around, she realized everything was sitting on a bench and there was a small table next to it. The bench and table were in horrible condition.

She looked at Mitch. “Didn’t your grandmother throw anything away? How long did she live by herself in this house? And how could her own kids just let her live like this? I mean, your dad lives a couple of miles away. What the hell is up with that?”

Mitch liked everything to have a place. He was a neat freak, and she was a self-admitted neat slob. If she could find things when she needed them, it never mattered that everything had a special place to go to. They’d had a few fights about it when they first moved in together. But this was more than just messy. This was hoarding. She was beginning to understand why Mitch was so OCD about where everything should go.

“My parents, sister, and I lived here for a while when I was younger, before my grandfather passed. The house wasn’t in this sort of condition, but it was messy. I know there were some mental health issues, but I have no clue why they didn't address them. Or maybe I’ve just blocked it out. I guess after my grandfather died, she went a tad mental.”

“A tad? Dear, we’ve been filling up trash bags for an hour and, based on what I’ve seen, I’m guessing we have hours more just in this front hallway. There’s still the rest of downstairs. The entire upstairs. We haven’t looked in the basement. Did you notice the smell of the sewer from the toilet? I’m going outside for a cigarette.”

Mitch joined her on the porch. “Wanna take a break and explore the neighborhood? We can grab dinner from the hot dog place on the corner.” He gave Lana a wink. “And you need to learn how to eat a proper Chicago hot dog.”

“Oh, shut up. I’ll put ketchup on whatever I want. But yeah, a walk sounds like a great idea.”

After munching on hot dogs and fries, they let the cat loose downstairs and started cleaning the upstairs hallway. The plan was to work their way through the house, at least getting the trash out. Armed with a roll of trash bags, gloves, sponges and cleaning supplies, Lana thought they could make some good headway.

The room they had chosen as their bedroom and the room they had set up Millie in were clean (if they could be called that, compared to the rest of the house); the front bedroom and hallway were another matter.

Upstairs in the hallway was another pathway created by piles of boxes and bags leading to the front bedroom. In a corner, two dressers were overflowing with clothes, papers, boxes, and pictures. The dresser drawers were hanging open, unable to be closed. Lana reached into one drawer and pulled out a handful of old, moldy baseball cards. Mitch thought they may have been his father's childhood. Another reach into a drawer produced a coin collection, now dirty and disorganized. Clothes, pictures, and paper were scattered in and around both dressers. Mitch found envelopes crammed with canceled checks, bank statements, and income tax returns. Another open drawer held boxes and envelopes of family pictures, all moldy and ruined.

Like the hallway, the front bedroom was full of more clothes, boxes, bags, loose papers, and books. It was hard to open the door all the way because the room was so crammed with things.

As with previous rooms, a small path led from the doorway to the bed. More extension cords ran across the pathway, but Lana couldn't see what they could have been connected to. There were no space heaters or fans in sight. The room was chillier than the rest of the house. The front window was open a few inches. When Lana tried to close it, she noticed that the window was jammed open. It had ruined everything within a few feet. The room overlooked the street. Why had no one tried to break in?

Lana sat on the bed, unsure of what might happen or if critters would come out of some hidden hole. “This is overwhelming. I can’t wrap my head around how bad this is. Your aunts lied to us, and how could your parents not see this?”

Mitch sat down next to her. “If it helps, I didn’t think it was this bad either. I’m pissed at my aunts, who insisted the house was livable. I’m thinking it might not be. And yes, I noticed the smell from the bathroom. I think it’s time we started in the basement and work our way up. Let’s grab a flashlight, more trash bags, and gloves.”

Millie came running up the stairs with a half-dead mouse in her mouth. She dropped it in the bedroom doorway with a look of pride in her eyes.

Lana didn’t know what to expect as she and Mitch opened the door to the basement stairs and started going down. The musty, non-lived-in smell was stronger. The sewer odor made the air almost unbreathable. Mitch turned on the lights, and the couple stood at the foot of the stairs and looked around.

The basement stretched the length of the house, but the overhead lights stopped before the other end of the room. A table in the corner was covered in rusty tools, in the shadows. Someone bolted the back door to the yard shut.

A refrigerator stood in another corner, with a chain and padlock wrapped around it.

“I don’t even want to know,” said Lana.

“We were always told never to open the fridge,” Mitch said. “My sister and I used to make up many wild stories about what was in there. The most common one was the dead body story.”

Along with the back door being bolted shut, one windowpane in the door had a hole, and weeds grew from outside. A pile of moldy boxes sat next to the back door. Lana thought they might disintegrate if she touched them.

The basement was like the upstairs—piles of boxes, some opened and some closed, and trash scattered all over the floor.

Mitch aimed the flashlight on the ceiling and said it was pure asbestos. “I think it was on a very long list of things my grandfather meant to fix, then I suspect he didn’t care.”

On one wall was a table filled with books, pictures, toys and moldy stuffed animals, and various other things from his father’s and aunts’ childhoods. Time had ruined most of them.

As the pair walked around, Lana realized it was getting harder to ignore the sewer smell. She pointed to a pipe coming down from the ceiling. It ended a few inches above the floor. “Isn’t that where the bathroom is?”

“This pipe goes to the toilet,” Mitch said. “There’s the pipe in the ground, but—” Mitch trailed off. It was too obvious what he was going to say. Every time someone flushed the toilet, the gap between the two pipes could spew the water and waste all over the basement floor.

Lana stared up. “That’s beyond unsanitary. Let me guess, it’s been like that for years? Was it like this when you lived here?”

Mitch admitted that it probably was.

“I need a smoke,” she said. “What are we doing for dinner? I have no desire to even try to cook anything.”

Monday evening

Mitch offered to get hot dogs or burgers from the hot dog stand on the corner. “We can start going over the first floor after we eat. There’s still the living room to look over, and we haven’t heard a peep from the cat in a while.”

Millie was waiting in the hallway with another half-dead mouse before running off to see what else she could find. “All these toys that move on their own! I like this place!”

“Well, at least one of us is having fun,” Mitch said.

The couple’s boxes and furniture made the already crowded living room even more cramped. Moving things around, Lana found two space heaters and three box fans. They were plugged into one of the many extension cords. Lana had to wonder how the house hadn’t gone up in flames.

The couple picked up as much trash as they could. They had long ago stopped going through it. Any loose papers, clothes, and old books went straight into trash bags. To Lana, it seemed the more they filled up the bags, the more there was to throw away.

As they were taking out the latest haul to the alley, Lana asked what was in the garage. Mitch struggled to open the door all the way because the garage was filled to the brim with more bags, boxes, a few bikes, three lawn mowers, and tools. As with the house, there was a pathway from the door to the yard to the garage door that opened to the alleyway. They agreed the garage would be the last thing to clean.

Mitch admitted that he had to use the bathroom but didn’t want to use the only bathroom in the house. “We can walk over to the grocery store,” he said. “There are public restrooms there.”

“We can’t go to a public rest room every time we have to pee,” Lana said. “I don’t know if I can do this. I don’t think we can do this. This is not what we signed up for. We were lied to.”

As they made their way back upstairs, Lana noticed something she hadn’t seen before. On the stairway landing to the second floor, there were vines from outside growing on the corner landing. The house's external wall had a three-inch crack running up the corner of the landing. It took her a full minute to realize the exterior wall was coming apart from the house.

The couple picked up burgers and fries after walking to the grocery store to use the bathroom. They ate in silence on the front porch. Behind the screen door, Millie waited for another mouse. Lana wondered how many she had caught.

“So, what now?” she asked. “Are you thinking what I am? Maybe we can’t live here. Maybe your aunts and parents didn’t know how bad it was? Or did they know but didn’t care? I’m seriously trying to wrap my brain around this. We left New Orleans on a promise that we’d have a place to live. But we can’t. We just can’t. I can’t.” Lana was on the verge of tears.

Mitch was silent for a minute. “I know. I wish we had a camera to take pictures of everything we have found. We’ll grab paper and pen, start at the basement, work through the house, and make a list. I don’t know what else to do.” He sounded as defeated and angry as Lana felt.

Early Tuesday morning, 1 am

Hours later, with a list two pages long, Lana and Mitch were sitting in a booth at a nearby 24-hour diner. The food they had ordered sat untouched. The couple paid the bill and walked back to the house to try to get a few hours of sleep.

Tuesday morning, 8 am

Mitch called his parents. “We can’t live here. The house is unfit and dangerous for human habitation. Can we stay with you until we find an apartment? We can leave what we absolutely don’t need here until we find something.”

Mitch’s parents arrived, and the car was loaded with clothes and a few other things. Millie sat in the cat carrier and howled. The couple stood in the doorway for a bit, defeated, angry and wondering what they would do next. Their dreams of having a house to themselves had been pulled out from under them.

Lana felt her heart breaking as they drove away. The house that nobody loved would once again be empty.

Kim Hayes lives in Chicago, IL and works for the Chicago Cubs. She has been writing fiction and CNF for two years. Some of her recent stories have been published in Roi Faineant, Epater, Nifty Lit. Later this year some of her work will be in the Corner Bar and Academy of the Heart and Mind.