"But now we face this potential of falling off a cliff. That's the biggest challenge" of his job, he says.

It was a year ago today that I began noticing the wall paper in the kitchen peeling above the cracked wooden cabinets.  Frayed strands started fawning at the doorframe to the garage slowly down toward the refrigerator.  Garnished daisies tied together in long strands began fading and dying as if an imminent winter trimmed the walls kissing the ceiling.

I moved into the apartment in April after my brother and his girlfriend were engaged and just shortly after their second barking ankle-biter chewed through my friend’s cherished copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude.  That afternoon as I was loading my car I thought I heard each generation, individually, screaming from its anus.  

The walls of the apartment are white, various nail holes in them.  Some of them belong, while others seem desperately random. 

Above the baseboards leading into the living room begin a succession of holes every four inches encompassing the entire wall in what looked like spaces the size of postcards. 

Three inches above an electrical socket in the kitchen three feet off the ground is a nail hole thick as a number two pencil and I can only imagine what it must have held, perhaps a glazed wooden stand supporting an antique lamp where the base is the coiling trunk of a crooked and slanted sycamore, the lampshade, large voluptuous branches playing an unusual game with light, and at its base, an inquisitive blond peering around the corner at the backside of a disappearing rabbit. 

Most importantly were the holes in the bathroom.  It was the kind of bathroom where you were almost certain someone had fallen and cracked their head open on the porcelain tub and bled out in two red waterfalls down either side.  The imitation tiles were still new and tearing at the corners.  Around the oval mirror beside a tawdry white cabinet are holes deliberately nailed in clusters of five, and for those I had no speculation. 

I spend most of my time in the kitchen scrubbing down the stove, the pink tiles above the sink, tiles I didn’t realize were pink until I’d been there for a week, and compulsively washing dishes because I found it therapeutic after my brother’s arrest three months earlier. 

Every night I wash dishes and stare at the pink tiles listening to Westerns on tape imagining how Gus Cavy looks when he slaps Isadora, before she’s rescued by the courageous Billy Squire.