Note: Tiny House is best viewed on desktop.
TINY HOUSE
Illustrated by Marisa Melo
1
The tiny house was made from the larger house, your needlessly enormous house from the subdivision for which the old-growth forest was cut clear, the creek filled in with the finality of cul-de-sac concrete. The enormous house was meant to be the objective of your edgeless dreams. But these were someone else’s dreams; you had not asked for dreams like these, which occupy the unceded ancestral, traditional, and contemporary lands of those who also did not want them.
You had not chosen to build a house so enormous as this. What is left but the dismantling of these things—dreams, house? The stripping down to the studs, the decamping to a thrush-loud glade with just enough, just enough?
2
The roof of the tiny house is pointed as a prayer. Across its skylights the desert clouds and constellations trace their passage. This is how the outside comes in. Comes in and nests. There’s a thrumming blood warmth under these wings and a trilling. This is how you live inside the tiny house and it lives inside of you.
3
The tiny house has side doors only, because it has no beginning and no end. It is circular and mobile, a nomad with no foundation. Inside it you imagine soluble selves, your boundaries porous, your nouns and verbs fluid.4
On the promontory overlooking the encroaching sea, sunlight makes a moiré in the center of the tiny house, as do you and the one you love. There are bright spaces all around you. In the bright spaces you prepare the seed-beds of new ideas.
Renovate, dod gast you, renovate!
Remember the old modernisms, but scour them of impurities in the frigid salt surf.
5
In the cypress grove, where former sugar plantation meets eternal riverbank, the makers of poor man’s guitars come into the tiny house. They find your cigar boxes, olive oil canisters, ham tins; they string them and they strum. In the kitchen, someone makes a frying pan banjo. Someone else plays the cast iron pots. You fill the tiny house with its own music; your breath is animal song.
6
Games to play in the tiny house,
when in transit:
The Unreliable Narrator
Numb-Limb Dance-Off
That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore!
Longest Breath-Hold
Saddest Country Song Freestyle
Animal-Headed God Calls
Memory Television
7
In the breakfast nook by the tiny kitchen, you pry pomegranates into hemispheres. Their geode gleam in the prairielight is how a child dreams of treasure and you think of the miracle of small things. You think it’s almost too much to have such riotous beauty, right there for the taking. Just as when you open the doors to hear the sough of winter and the snow blows in, gathers itself in a carpet of diamond dust. This is so radiantly magnificent that you’re almost grateful when it vanishes.
8
According to the 2018 International Residential Code, Appendix Q, the tiny house can never become an empire; it will not permit itself such colonizing violence. It presents itself to the land that will have it. It bears witness and then rolls on, rolls on. But you know that when it meets another tiny house in another glade, behind a dead mall, it can become a tiny village, for a time.
9
The tiny house, in the lot between a current Bank of America and a future Bank of America, is a question that is content to simply be a question. Just approaching is to take part in the asking, which is all it wants from you. Entering the tiny house, you become the tiny person it is meant to hold.
10
You will measure your children’s heights against the vertical oak beam in the kitchen and notch their progress. They will grow big in the tiny house. But not too big.
