Entry One Hundred Seven: Adam Mahoney, You Just Won!

[This entry is the current story I am working on. This is thirty-seven of who knows how many will be posted. Enjoy it while it lasts...]

One evening, a few weeks into his new hobby, he came up with a solution, more out of necessity than anything noble. He had just returned from the gym, walked through the front door and stopped. He had to; there was nowhere to place his foot for another step. His living room looked like a floor exercise for a major war game, only in The Battle of Adam’s House, tanks and planes were accompanied by Mustangs and monster trucks. Instead of pushing anything aside to make a path to his bedroom, he went back out the front door and walked to the garage, found a large cardboard box and entered the house through the kitchen door. He started at the edge of the plastic mélange, then began carefully lifting models off the floor and placing them on the bottom of the box. When he had safely secured all the container could handle, he left through the kitchen door and walked across the street to the Broughton’s house and strolled through their front door. He headed straight to the credenza in their living room, a large, cherry sideboard, its flat surface covered with framed photographs of the nuclear and extended family of the home’s former occupants. He set the box of models aside, began removing all of the pictures and stacking them on the floor. After the top of the furniture was cleared he began arranging his models in their place.

The placement started randomly but soon Adam began assembling the miniature replicas in more aesthetic groupings. World War II planes formed one group, desert tanks another. He completed the credenza display and had used all of the models he had carried in the box so he packed the box with the framed photographs, returned to his house, dumped the contents in the trash and filled the box again with his creations. He returned to the Broughton’s, seeking out any nook or flat surface that held a photograph and replaced them with the models. Bookshelves, dressers and china cabinets soon displayed Adam’s work, cars and tanks replacing the reminders of the past. In place of photos on walls he dangled model planes, using fishing line tied to an eyehook he screwed into the ceiling. After four trips there were no visual reminders of the Broughton’s anywhere in the house. As he perused his work, Adam felt some better, the chasm feeling less empty, yet sad that his outlook improved only by diminishing something—someone—else. “But if that’s what it takes. For the first time ever, it really is all about me.”

Adam continued with his replacement plan, eventually reworking all of the houses surrounding his own, the houses whose lawns he had mowed and whose earlier visits had disturbed him so. With each completed redesign, his soul grew a little stronger, for what reasons he couldn’t say. Maybe it was the symbolism of throwing away the memories of his neighbors or maybe it was the small rush of executing another project, creating mini-museums of his handiwork, on display for no one. It didn’t matter; at minimum he could move in and out of the houses without having to deal with the creeping feeling of abandonment he had experienced when he first entered the abodes. It expanded his world, his kingdom, and with it his comfort zone which was no small matter for the last man standing on the face of the earth.

All words and images ©2007/J. Colle