the winter house.

The dog is growing fatter because it’s winter and he doesn’t spend so much time outside anymore. I scold him because he sits on top of my hope chest to see out the picture window and he will scratch it with his claws.

We are all indoor creatures now, pale and heavy and tired. The windows stay shut until four in the morning, when I open the one above my bed an inch, two inches, and the cold slips in. The 19th of January and there is rain on the eaves, gentle and cold. Stale heat rises from registers in the floor, driving a wedge of air between the water and me. There are no birds scratching in the hollows of the patio roof.

We live in a house of angles. The window in the door is reflected, quadrilateral, in the tilted mirror that sits on top of the out-of-tune piano. The cupboards do not quite close, catching on knee-bones. Nothing is smooth or kind; the doors drag and catch, the carpets ripple; the wallpaper peels at the corners, the paint flakes; the baseboards are dented and dinged. The kitchen floor is smudged with dust. We are all too tired to clean.

I smell the contents of the glass jars lined up on my bureau with their round bellies in the palm of my hand: peony root, clove, bee pollen, peppermint, sea salt, yarrow, vervain. Outside this room, there is a miasma of misery, deep as dust and thick to breathe.

My brother is plagued with headaches and a broken tooth that must wait until February to be fixed. My father’s bedside table is crowded with red bottles banded in green (the signature that they are his—mine are blue, Mom’s purple, Cole’s red), the gleaming klaxons of pain beneath a desk lamp, piles of acetaminophen and morphine that will release slowly into his blood, mingled with the lighter opiates that will ease the pain in his old scarred foot and his newly-broken back. My mother sits, sinking daily into the brown armchair, and I know that her purple-banded bottle is not doing enough anymore.

I sit on the floor with the dog. He sniffs my knees and I take off my headband, a thing I never wear, a thin strip of bright plastic, red with white dots. I put it over his dark head, in front of his ears, and he bows down to paw it away.