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I Want to Live in a Paper House
Let's just say I've learned nothing from that foolish first pig who chose straw: I want to live in a paper house.
When I say paper I don't mean cardboard. Besides, "a house of cards" is just an expression like "glass houses," which are not really glass as much as the people inside are hypocrites.
Sure, a paper house can't withstand mudslides but neither could those million-dollar ones in the San Bernardino Valley last winter. But why dwell on the worst that can happen? Why not design a house with the best days in mind? Days of sun without wind, therein my patchwork of multicolored construction paper is perched on white sand stuck with paper roses on pipe cleaner stems. And out back tacked against a manila folder fence: charcoal sketches of bike, clothespin bag, and garden tools.
So the walls of my house are paper thin, all the easier to hear what goes on in the next room and record it word for word on floors you can wrap a hoagie in. See me rise from ink-stained knees, but only for the delivery of the National Geographic. Other callers are welcome if they carry letters of introduction not on but instead of their person.
I want a house that can be rolled up into a ball if necessary and tossed—hit or miss—into a yawning mesh receptacle I'd just as soon call God.
You may want to live in a teepee or something Tudor and once I even sent out Christmas cards that pictured an igloo sitting in the middle of nowhere lit by the moon and a few colored lights strung around the entrance. But that was disingenuous because I was just getting my way again. Let's face it, the igloo was made of paper; inside it said Peace on Earth instead of there being a pool table in the basement.
There's no place like home but it's the paper version I want, starting with marriage, which they say is more than just a piece of paper and I have to agree— it's reams and reams, too many to count and you have to throw a lot out but not before writing on the back of what is already used and pretending it's new.
I can hear us now, telling our children not to waste paper, to think of all the people living in real houses on which there's no place to scribble, poor people with many secrets living behind thick walls. They'll roll their eyes and challenge us to name one and the wise-asses will have backed us into a corner because if I'm living in a paper house the whole neighborhood is paper and a map of the world is just that, the world itself including that great uninscribed tract, Antarctica, at the bottom of it all. Having led sheltered lives we won't be able to name one such person, someone so destitute as to live in stone or stucco, not one name will come to mind though we know from the newspapers they're out there.
Sharon Black
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Sharon Black is the librarian at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania. She has poems published or forthcoming in The South Carolina Review, Slipstream, The Jacaranda Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Alaska Quarterly Review, Mudfish 11, Rhino, GW Review, White Pelican Review, FEMSPEC, and Schuylkill Valley Journal of the Arts. She lives in Wallingford, PA with her husband and two children.
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:hi:
RL
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