Used to be, here was a house of a hundred rooms. A sprawling, crumbling old pile of shit. Then one day it was torn down and they put up a new modern home. A beautiful thing, bright white. A man lived here alone, a rich and powerful man. Eventually he died.
         Vines grew up the sides and moisture chewed at the foundation. The walls sagged into the earth, bent askew and cracked. As the gardens eroded they turned up a lot of things: rotten corpses, severed limbs, skeletons caked in mushrooms, rusted guns and knives, black bricks of paper that used to be money, torn plastic bags with gray slop still coating the inside, which makes you cough just to take a sniff of.
         They hired us to clean it all up, and it was quite a job. The family graveyard wasn’t too bad, pretty orderly, but all that other stuff had seeped into the groundwater, and that was a hard thing to keep quiet. Downstream some of the village babies were born with organs in the wrong places, or with their brains all bitty. We cleaned out the communities the best we could.
         Then it got weirder. Down below the bodies and the old drugs, down even past the groundwater, we just kept finding more crap. Our files said the old house, the big one, had all been hauled away, but we kept finding pieces of it: smashed stained-glass windows, an intact fireplace with sixteen feet of chimney still standing, packed with dirt fifty feet underground. Whole rooms, intact: Bathrooms with perfect porcelain tubs, bedrooms with bed upon bed upon bed.
         We’re not archaeologists, we complained, and they agreed and paid us more money for the job.
         Anyway, it all goes into the incinerator, and the only thing that comes out of that is smoke. Last week one of our guys started yelling about how he can see a stained-glass Mary and Jesus in the clouds, and before we could stop him he’d leapt into the fire to join them. Since then we kept a better guard on the big furnace door.
         Yesterday we burned the last of it, and last night I had a dream that I was walking through that old house, which I’ve never seen and which hasn’t been there for fifty years. All my family were around, and it was a big family, sometimes they had to sleep twelve to a room. A man in a white suit walked through the place, and wherever he went my family screamed and melted and vanished into smoke. It wasn’t scary though, I knew he was working for us.
         This morning I drove to work, and I found the rest of my team, the dozen or so who are left, sitting at the bottom of the excavation. They’d done a good job: the corners were all squared off and braced with 1x6s, and they’d pounded the dirt firm and flat. When they saw me at the top of the pit they waved, whispered the last things they had to say to each other and lay down in nice straight rows with their hands crossed over their chests. The mixer truck was ready to go, and it was a breeze to sluice the concrete down the chute and into the pit. There was a beautiful moment there, one of those unrecaptureable things, when I could see this lovely spread of wet concrete covering everything except twelve or ten faces smiling up from it all, before they slipped, one, two, three, all of them, below the surface, and the concrete rose to the top of the pit and I stopped the pour and grabbed one of the long-handled trowels to smooth the surface of the new foundation.
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