House Hunting

Apartments are cheaper because they’re smaller and easier to pin down and because the deed has less space in which to hide as they bound about the prairies avoiding the hunt. It’s into these fields that the homes go when they’re released like healed animals back into the wilderness by the builders to become prey again to the eager.

You’ll have heard people talk about the process as brutal and that’s because it is — a hand-to-hand brawl with the drawers and the windows and the doors. But people continue to come nonetheless. Like our couple, now at the front of the queue on a bright and cold Sunday morning, the sun climbing above the horizon into the blue sky. The houses yawn awake. They can see theirs in the distance. It’s already moving. The couple have their paperwork in hand. She has the stapler. The house is cautious and it watches them come. Other residences between them. But as the gate opens, they run. And the house moves too.

She’s faster than him but he’s heavier and he’ll get and keep the doors open. The houses unlocked and they’re moving past them, the older, tireder ones with more work necessary passing them by as they cross the fields quickly like they’ve been rehearsing on Saturdays for weeks. But not yesterday. Just so they had their energy. It’s the house they saw in the brochure twelve months ago before the competition of others became fierce, before the builder nearly collapsed, before they’d lost again and again to the long lines at the rush in the carpark to queue for the gate where now, today, they’d made it early enough. But the lines were thinning too and they wondered if the houses were becoming more fierce. They’d see.

The mile between the gate and the house disappeared fast but not as fast as the house did behind the hills ahead. It crested and it turned its rear patio away from them to turn and look back to them through the first-floor-windows-as-eyes and then rotated back away, grinding the grass below it as it did, the front porch ripping through the slope as its tremendous weight pushed into the earth. But it takes a lot for a house to climb a hill and so its downward drop accelerates it but the pace slackens thereafter.

And she’s powering ahead. Almost there, atop the hill as the house drags away from it. She slows to let him catch up and he does and he powers on and over and down and he’s carried faster downward to the flat. Another soft rise is ahead and the house pushes for it but the back deck’s stairs down to the grass are an easy target as he approaches and she’s in behind him now. His legs tight with pain and hers the same but he gets a hand onto the balustrade and pulls himself forward before turning, smooth, on his heel and reaching back out to her. Like he’s practiced in quiet. She takes his hand, jumps on, and they stumble as the house hits the rise faster this time, dirt bursting about the garage, gouging through hill to an ascension.

At the crest, they throw themselves forward and against the back door and he misses the wood and hits the glass but it holds and it doesn’t crack and she’s worried about the warranty on it all if they did it and not the house. But he pulls the sliding door open and holds it still with one hand as he balances against the kitchen island while she hops inside. He throws it closed and she locks it and they steady themselves in the kitchen. The house crests. They can feel it. The unusual feeling of the floor falling beneath them like on a plane but with the weight of a life-to-be-lived above them and they come crashing down. 

He wonders what it means for the slab and she’s got her eyes on the cabinets as they swing open and crack shut but nothing comes spilling out which means the papers they need are in a drawer elsewhere. She’d be surprised if it was in the kitchen but as the house levels out she can see through the glass that they’re turning. Through the windows at the front door: towards another hill. Taller. Sharper. She sends him upstairs and she holds the stapler and the paper rolled tight as she rips open the kitchen drawers like a storm but finds nothing.

He’s at the stairs but checking the cupboards underneath and there’s also nothing. What they’re looking for is just a contract of sale, bulldog clipped together, somewhere it won’t get ruined, somewhere they can feasibly expect to find it so that if someone else got to the house at the same time as they did it became a game. For our couple, it is almost a chore. But it is the process. It’s usually in the master bedroom. And they’ll make it there. He’s racing for it but she has the stapler and the paperwork they need to affix to it and it’s with that shallow click that the house knows that it’s all over. That it’s settling down. Once, the paper had to be nailed to the door but progress has been made. Nails and hammers and moving houses were a dangerous combination.

It’s just not often that the houses crest hills. And it’s less often that they push up and through and on over ones while their buyers are inside. It’s not a game now of whether they’ll do it. It’s when. And it’s the funny feeling the house has of what to do with the time left to it. So like we sometimes do, it does something rare. This house jumps. Right as he finds it in the bedside table of the master bedroom — because they’ve also paid for the staging furniture.

It leaps from the top of the hill as he pulls it from the drawer and runs it out of the top, calling out, to the top of the stairs and he considers jumping too but he doesn’t and the weightlessness gets them again and his gut lurches as hers does and she’s at the bottom of the stairs telling him to drop it, drop it, drop it, and he does. 

The paper falls as the house does. But the paper doesn’t crash down to shake the walls. If modern miners knew how effective a home could be at digging holes they would use them more often but, like we’ve discussed, it’s uncommon for them to jump from modest heights and crater the ground in which they land. But they do. A four-bedroom crater with a garage and a back deck and a study and a sitting room and an open plan kitchen dining that gives way to a spacious feature living room that doubles as the entertainment hub of the home. Split-level with the living areas upstairs, two bathrooms there too, one an ensuite for the master (or the parents) and one for the children (or the tenants) separated by a staircase down which he’s falling and slamming into the wall with his shoulder and at the bottom of which she’s snatching the paper from its noncommittal to-and-fro fall. 

Paper to paper and a click and the house’s heavy earthward tremble stops and the bones of the place creak and they both look about to see where the noise is coming from so they can flag it if they think it will need fixed. She stands. He unfurls from his fumble, rubbing what will be a long bruise down his upper arm, and makes his way downstairs with ginger steps. It’s all they can do now to laugh about it.