The farmhouse, part 2
"It would be so easy to let yourself go without Cyte, she often thought. What had people done before it existed?"
Read part 1 of The farmhouse. My ghost (?) story continues as Kendra learns more about the cameras installed inside her new home.
Though each trip between Noah’s apartment and the farmhouse took nearly a half hour, they finished moving Kendra’s things by lunchtime. After they dropped off the Uhaul, they went to a grimy bar & grill a few exits east of the farmhouse to celebrate with skinny margaritas and a large order of steak fries.
“This doesn’t count because we carried all those boxes,” said Noah, squeezing a thick ribbon of ketchup onto the parchment paper lining the tray.
Their faces hot with pettiness, they swapped tired jokes at Caroline’s expense and rated the dicks in Noah’s Grindr DMs. Kendra was jubilant. For the first time in almost a month, thinking about her ex didn’t make her feel like a loser. The move from Noah’s couch to the farmhouse felt almost like a developmental milestone, as if she was more of an adult now than when she woke up this morning.
Kendra couldn’t see where to put her sticky new key. Behind her, Noah trundled down the farmhouse driveway, his taillights throwing grey arabesques on the gravel. As she fumbled with the lock, her head started to pound.
The lights were off inside, too. The farmhouse, so friendly when Sam was giving her the tour, had become creepy, the living room and kitchen stretching a long, cold mile between the front door and her new bedroom. At her old apartment, the alcove at the top of the stairs always glowed pink from a pull-chain lamp salvaged from Caroline’s childhood. Lately, Kendra had been scrolling through the archived Cyte footage from the camera installed next to it, revisiting three years of rose-colored homecomings: she and Caroline giggling, their arms laden with plastic grocery bags; or butchering, in sloppy unison, a pop song they heard at the townie bar’s weekly queer night; or racing to see who could strip her wet running clothes faster, the loser tasked with drawing their post-workout bubble bath.
A shower by herself would have to do. Kendra turned on the water as hot as it would go and climbed over the side of the tub. Squeezing her eyes shut, she squatted over the drain, praying the spins would go away soon.
By the time the water ran lukewarm, she felt more steady, but the pain in her head was worse. She dug her thumb into her eye socket, as if that might free whatever was trapped beneath her skull—a leaden bee, a nuclear pinball. Sighing, she climbed back out again and wrapped her towel around her shoulders, like she did when she was a child.
The wind had picked up. Unlike the trees in the orchard, whipping each other in its wake, the farmhouse resisted, cracking like enormous knuckles. Oddly still in contrast, the light from her puny desk lamp shadowed dozens of heavy cardboard boxes. Kendra was shivering, but at the thought of searching for her bathrobe, tears stung her eyelids. She wished she was curled up on Noah’s couch in front of a cozy screen, or in the bed that was always made up for her at her parents’ house. Even the old apartment, with Caroline stewing an arm’s length away, would have been better than this.
Sam must have aspirin somewhere, she thought, pinching the bridge of her nose. The green truck had been gone while she and Noah were dropping off the last of her things, but it was back under the carport when they returned from the bar & grill. Kendra peered into the kitchen. There was light beneath the other bedroom door.
She and Caroline had their first big fight the day they moved in together, while they were still unpacking. Kendra had been on her best behavior back then—though they’d been dating for almost a year, it was her first time living with a girlfriend. But their eventual compromise, wrung from the argument like dishwater from a rag, had been so exhausting to attain that they fell asleep on the bedspread, still in their clothes.
It was all because of Caroline’s paintings. Caroline had wanted to hang several in their new place, and insisted on keeping her works in progress in the living room, like half-eaten cakes left to gather flies. (“It’s too bad she can’t sell more of them,” Mom had stage-whispered, eyeing the bright colors and revolutionary slogans at Caroline’s student show.) Kendra could hardly admit to disliking the ones that her girlfriend wanted to display, but she could reasonably object to the living room being used as her studio. After two hours of heated debate, it was agreed that Caroline could keep out one unfinished painting at a time. Though both claimed to be happy with the decision, their home decor was cursed from then on. Kendra hated Caroline’s Craigslisted pottery, and Caroline found ways—more and more blunt, as time passed—to express her distaste for the epigram prints that Kendra ordered from Amazon; she called them “basic,” which was awfully rich, Kendra thought, coming from someone whose best bet for postgrad work was teaching fingerpainting at the local charter school.
Kendra took a deep breath. Sam was her roommate, not her ex. Still, maybe she should text first—but then she remembered that she didn’t have her number yet. Two excuses tipped the scales of propriety. Instead of disturbing Sam, she would just take a peek in the medicine cabinet in her bathroom, which was just off the kitchen. She pulled the towel from her shoulders, rewrapping it around her torso and tucking in the top against her breasts. She would worry about her bathrobe in the morning.
Kendra stepped up onto the cold kitchen tile. Behind her, the desk lamp spread its apron of yellow light a few inches past her foot. Between that and the light from Sam’s bedroom, there was only darkness and the wind in the eaves. Putting her hand out in front of her, she took another step. Fingers slowly wiggling, she placed one foot before the other in small, uncertain steps. She was trying to remember where exactly the dining table was when she felt something soft, like a spiderweb, pass over her bare thigh.
The dog’s name came out just a few decibels below a shriek. As Kendra collided with the counter, Sam’s door swung open. Light spilled into the kitchen, exposing the dining table, its chairs, and the butcher block island like prisonbreakers under a spotlight.
“There you are,” said Sam. The door widened to allow Misty, tail wagging, to click inside.
“She scared me!” cried Kendra. Stupid. There she was, sneaking around in the dark. “God, I’m sorry.” Her heart was racing. Keeping her arm folded tightly against her chest, she tried to catch her breath. “I would have texted but I didn’t get your number.”
Sam’s socks and boxer briefs were the same faded black, but her t-shirt was white. Piercings tented it like twin knives under a sheet. “I don’t have a phone, remember?” She pointed to the dining table. “Except the landline.”
“Oh,” said Kendra. Beneath her towel, her flush seemed to go everywhere, from her ribs to the backs of her thighs.
She was locking her bedroom door behind her when she remembered the aspirin. The tears finally came, but she wasn’t going back out there tonight. Leaving her towel in a crumble on the floor, Kendra swaddled herself in her comforter, laid down on the mattress, picked up her phone, and opened Cyte.
Kendra’s routine at the farmhouse quickly took shape. Early in the morning, while the crows screamed in the dark, she was awakened by the smell of Sam’s coffee. Warm under her comforter, she opened Cyte.
For a moment, its cheesy hero—Your Life, Your Content—would throb beside banner images of carefree multiracial people, none of them older than she. Then it would disappear, revealing her profile. Her mutuals in different time zones would have updated while she slept, and sometimes there was already fresh personal content from the day before. There was Kendra, tightening her ponytail at the gas station or impatiently tapping the countertop at the university library. No matter how poor the quality of the surveillance footage, she looped every video, scrutinizing her clothes, her posture, her ass. She’d gained weight since the breakup, though she refused to get on the scale to find out just how much. It would be so easy to let yourself go without Cyte, she often thought. What had people done before it existed?
But at that early hour, not even Cyte could hold her attention for long. Lulled by the sounds of Sam getting ready for work, Misty clicking at her heels, Kendra would eventually fall asleep again, her phone glowing on the comforter beside her.
When her alarm went off a few hours later, Kendra would get out of bed, reheat the coffee, and get to work. By then, Sam would be long gone. She was part of the maintenance crew on campus, mowing lawns and spraying bugs. She and Misty would return in the early afternoon, as the sun was sinking into bruise-colored clouds. Sam would shower while Kendra had lunch, her first meal of the day, with Misty waiting outside the bathroom door. Once, Kendra offered her a glob of low-fat hummus. The dog sniffed the air, then looked away.
If Kendra didn’t have to go to campus after lunch, she would review her notes while Sam read and smoked on the porch, or rummaged around in the woodshed, Misty at attention under the carport. Sometimes, when she needed a break, Kendra would get up to walk the perimeter of the farmhouse, peering out every window except the ones in Sam’s bedroom. All of them opened onto the same view: gravel, grass, the wall of trees. Sometimes she couldn’t see Sam and Misty. Were they in the orchard? If the pickup was still there, where else would they be? All would be quiet until, a little before sundown, she heard them on the porch—the scrape of boots, the scratch of nails.
As Sam had told Kendra while she was signing the rental agreement, her room was a sublet. The farmhouse and truck were rented and leased, respectively. She didn’t know who the orchard belonged to.
“We always meant to buy once we’d saved up enough,” Sam said, tapping the porch with her boot. On the piece of paper, their initials overlapped like kindling. “Get our little farm off the ground.”
Kendra didn’t think to ask what they had wanted to grow. “But it’s still okay for you to walk around out there?” she said, gesturing toward the trees. “No one minds?”
“I mean, I wouldn’t if I were you,” said Sam, rubbing a callus at the base of her ring finger. Kendra couldn’t tell if she was joking. She waited for her to go on, but she didn’t.
After dinner, Sam usually went to her bedroom, leaving every hour or so to smoke on the porch. If she was working in the kitchen, Kendra would occasionally catch glimpses of the ancient desktop, vintage TV, and cheap shelves distended by hundreds of paperbacks. Sam’s room was smaller than hers and looked even more so because of the king-size bed—far too large for Sam and Misty, who to Kendra’s disgust was permitted to join her there. She felt sorry for Sam, and wondered if she should offer to pay more for her room, luxurious in comparison, especially considering Sam’s dream of someday owning the farmhouse. But then she thought about Mexico City and didn’t. It would be one thing, of course, if Sam asked her to pay more. She’d probably refuse such an offer, anyway.
After her own dinner—a can of soup with gluten-free crackers if she’d been to campus, hold the crackers if she hadn’t—Kendra graded papers with Netflix on in the background before getting back into bed to end the day as she began it: scrolling Cyte, though now with the bottle of gin she kept in her night stand. This was how she learned that not only were the cameras in the kitchen and on the front porch functional, but that they weren’t the only ones in the farmhouse.
Thank you for joining me as I try a little something different. If you’d like to support my work—most of which is free—you can subscribe, buy my books, or find me on Twitter, Instagram, and Bluesky.
SO invested in this - read it between sets in the gym