<\/p>\n
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Waiting For the Paint To Dry<\/strong><\/p>\n The paint on the wall; it never seems to dry.\u00a0 Yesterday my brat child ran her fingers through the wet film on the surface of the sheetrock then wiped it on the carpet.\u00a0\u00a0 I was mad but she just cussed me and then ran outside and disappeared.\u00a0 She has not come back.<\/p>\n What can you say to people when they ask how things are going?\u00a0 \u201cOh, okay I guess . . . except the house is painted nine different colors and none of them will dry.\u00a0 And, oh yeah, my daughter has become a little monster.\u201d<\/p>\n My wife Alice would probably disagree.\u00a0 If she were here.\u00a0 Which she is not, as far as I know.<\/p>\n The thing is, the house talks.\u00a0 I\u2019m serious.\u00a0 More accurately, I guess you would say it writes.\u00a0 The house draws smiles in its own wet paint and then it writes on its own walls.\u00a0 It erases it before I can even say anything in response.\u00a0 Nobody else sees it.\u00a0 It makes the writing go away.\u00a0 And the stuff it says; well, it\u2019s less than polite, I will tell you that.<\/p>\n It\u2019s ruined my daughter.\u00a0 The house with its chatty wet paint is like an uncooperative babysitter, evil and cunning, setting a horrible example.\u00a0 It\u2019s one step ahead of you and you can\u2019t fire it like you could a regular sitter.\u00a0 I guess you could set fire to it.\u00a0 Maybe that is an option.<\/p>\n I hired a guy, name of Sherman, to repaint the whole place.\u00a0 Inside and out.\u00a0 I found him on Craigslist.\u00a0 He looked it over, he seemed to think he could do the job.<\/p>\n Didn\u2019t work out.<\/p>\n Sherman was in the laundry room getting ready to go after the wall with a paint roller.\u00a0 I walked by on my way out to the front yard and noticed a gigantic smile in the paint on the laundry room wall.\u00a0 It didn\u2019t register right away but the smile was actually more of a drooling mouth with big teeth.\u00a0 From the front yard I heard a scream; when I got back inside Sherman was gone.\u00a0 The mouth on the wall was now grinning and licking its lips.<\/p>\n God damned house.\u00a0 What will I do when the body starts to stink?\u00a0 Lucky for me that people disappear off Craigslist all the time.<\/p>\n When Alexis comes back \u2013 she is so petulant sometimes; but when she comes back maybe I am going to have to move.\u00a0 It will be a tough decision.\u00a0 This is a great neighborhood \u2013 other than, you know, man-eating house with perpetual wet paint.<\/p>\n And I\u2019m not sure how to market it.\u00a0 How much do I tell the realtor?\u00a0 What if the house doesn\u2019t want me to move?\u00a0 It could eat the realtor or any prospective buyers.\u00a0 This has become a real problem.<\/p>\n Of course my wife Alice might have something to say about it.<\/p>\n She\u2019s the one who painted this place these goofy colors.\u00a0 She\u2019s the one who looked me right in the eye, then stepped into the wall of the kitchen; walked right through the paint.<\/p>\n We were having a fight.\u00a0 I should have sensed that she was up to something.\u00a0 We always used to fight about how to discipline Alexis.\u00a0 How to raise our child.\u00a0 I might have known it would come to something like this.<\/p>\n Alice was the type who always had to win an argument.\u00a0 No matter what it took.\u00a0 She always had to be right.<\/p>\n She always had to have the last word; even if it was unspoken.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Steve Sibra<\/strong> is a is a Montana farm boy relocated to the big city.\u00a0 He has been published in the USA, Canada and Europe.\u00a0 Steve’s poetry chapbook is titled The\u00a0Turtle Is Not A Metaphor<\/em> and his work is linked from the facebook page “Steve Sibra – Author of Poems and Stories.”<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Waiting For the Paint To Dry The paint on the wall; it never seems to dry.\u00a0 Yesterday my brat child ran her fingers through the wet film on the surface of the sheetrock then wiped it on the carpet.\u00a0\u00a0 I was mad but she just cussed me and then ran outside and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13643","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-prose-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13643","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13643"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13643\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13953,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13643\/revisions\/13953"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13643"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13643"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13643"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}