Splinter

“Home is where the heart is” by Bríd Moynahan

Before Cousin Bobby, no one had ever noticed the sliding door. It must’ve always hung there, nestled inside the wall between the kitchen and the den, tucked away in its thin crevice. If we’d paid attention, we might’ve seen the grooves running across the top of the doorframe, parted by a thin piece of metal in an upside-down T shape that the door would slide out on, like a suspended monorail. We’d lived in our old house for an entire year and never known it was there—this secret piece of our home, hidden inside the wall like a mouth closed around a tongue.

That morning, Cousin Bobby had waited until our parents left as he always did, perching by the bay windows until the station wagon’s engine was out of hearing, then wandering our old house—around wooden banisters and transom windows, opening cabinets in the old secretary, inspecting the ancient radiators, looking for new places to try his pocketknife. We had seen him dragging it along the walls, scoring faint lines across the hallway moulding, or scraping its blade back and forth between closed shutter slats. We slept poorly after finding little nicks on our bedposts, not knowing when he had made them. Then there were the marks on our toys, like the scars on the red rocking horse and the ancient paper kaleidoscope whose little colored shapes suddenly tumbled from a hole.

When Cousin Bobby came to live with us, we’d only remembered him from the photos Aunt Amelia sometimes mailed, and from the time when we were six and had been driven a half-day to visit them, picking our Mary Jane’s up and down on the sticky carpet in their dark apartment. While Mother yelled at Aunt Amelia, we went to Cousin Bobby’s room, which smelled like dirty sheets. He was ten or eleven then. “Look at my army,” Cousin Bobby had said, pointing to dozens of cardboard toilet paper tubes with angry faces drawn on them. They covered half his floor. He spent the rest of our visit moving them around in slow, elaborate formations, and we could see the little circles in the sticky carpet where he’d pressed them into their positions. We didn’t stay very long. Mother drove us all the way home again, late into the night.

 Maybe the door hadn’t been there until Cousin Bobby came to live with us because when you find something new, it didn’t really exist before. Or maybe it had appeared just for him.

The morning he found it, Cousin Bobby was newly thirteen, and—though it was long after breakfast—still wearing his Spiderman pajamas. Seven inches of white calves and ankles stuck out from the pants, flattening into Cousin Bobby’s strangely large feet, which flopped around the house, sticking to and peeling up from the hardwood like flippers. Cousin Bobby always looked like he had just woken up. He’d wait until the afternoon to throw on the graphic t-shirts and Levi’s Mother bought him from J.C. Penny, but sometimes he spent the whole day in his pajamas, dull black hair sticking to his head like a doll smushed in a toy box too long.

Cousin Bobby stood on the threshold between the kitchen and the den, hair pointing in odd directions, probing the tip of his pocketknife into the doorframe. As he pressed it deeper, we could tell that he was prying out a lanky strip of flimsy wood, which had covered the place where the sliding door could be pulled out—only three inches wide but stretching nearly ten feet high, almost to the ceiling. We were eight then, in our matching dresses, holding hands as we often did, watching Cousin Bobby wiggle his blade—wedging, jimmying, until POP—and the old glue gave out, sending the thin strip, like a felled tree, crashing to the kitchen floor.

A slender recess appeared, cradling the profile of an old door. 

A “pocket door,” our father would call it later. “Like Bobby’s pocketknife. It stays hidden until you need it.”

Skinny Cousin Bobby was barely strong enough to pull out the ancient door, which had rusted in its ceiling track, shuddering and squealing as it slid from the belly of our house. As all good doors do, it both enclosed and separated, cordoning us off in the kitchen from where Cousin Bobby strained in the den, sweat droplets converging on his chin. We were pleased when we could no longer see him, although we could hear his heavy breathing on the other side as through a thick curtain.

Alone, then, the door loomed above us. Never before had we seen anything so alluring.

Its border was dark wood, smooth and many-eyed, engraved with unbloomed rosebuds. These tight pods swelled like knuckles, connected by thin, raised stems that vined around the outline.

But inside that border, encompassing most of the door, a broad pine inlay was badly splintered. Shards of wood crosshatched, chipped, and fractured in mysterious patterns. Spines jutted out with glittering sharpness like a Magic Eye cactus jungle.

Immediately, we wanted to touch it.

It was not unlike the strange urge we felt once to jump from the high porthole window three tall stories above the front lawn. In June, Cousin Bobby had lured us into the attic, meowing plaintively so that we worried Chestnut was lost among the rafters. We saw the spikes driving up through the floorboards as Cousin Bobby nailed the folding stairs closed, laughing. When the afternoon came and the attic heated like a stove, we sweated all the way through our dresses, until, somehow, the stainedglass porthole clicked itself open where there hadn’t been so much as a hinge before. The house invited us to climb onto the sill. We didn’t think much about it then, preoccupied as we were with gulping fresh air. Summer wind cooling our hot, damp faces, perched high above the prickly holly bushes, we studied the ground far below us and were overcome with that strange feeling—what if? Instead, we found the drainpipe.

Seeing the splinters on the door, we felt the same strange urge and withdrew our judgments of Sleeping Beauty. Why not prick your finger on a spindle or jump from a great height? Between the decision and the pain is the most powerful feeling. When it seems like you could sleep for a hundred years or that the wind might catch you.

It is a longing we still understand, old as we are now.  

*** 

That afternoon, we searched for more secrets. But the back of our parents’ wardrobe was just a flimsy piece of particle board. In the basement, the old iron furnace was cold and dormant. The closet under the stairs was stuffed with our Weeble People and Pat the Bunny books, bins full of little sneakers and patent leather Mary Jane’s—two pairs in every size. Nothing mysterious there. We wondered where Cousin Bobby’s old shoes were. He’d brought just one backpack when he came to live with us. Inside, only his sandals, his Spiderman pajamas, his pocketknife.

When our parents came home, Cousin Bobby showed them the door.

“Ooh,” our mother said.

“Hmm,” our father said.

They pushed it back into its pocket, and then the smell of cooking garlic made everything seem safer as we watched Battle Bots with Cousin Bobby until dinner.

“We should sand that door down,” our mother said, trying to capture peas on her fork.

“We don’t need a door between the kitchen and the den,” our father said. He’d spent a lot of time on this ancient house, which we’d inherited from Mother’s side, doctoring pipes, replacing toilets, gluing old furniture, repairing the back deck, and finishing the basement floor. When he and Mother were arguing once, we heard him say, wearily, “I used to have hobbies—now I have this house.”

Cousin Bobby said nothing. We wondered if he was thinking about his parents.

“Be nice to Bobby,” Father had said a few weeks after Cousin Bobby came to live with us. His mother had checked herself into rehab, then disappeared.

“What you have to understand,” Father cleared his throat, “is that Aunt Amelia has an addiction. That’s why she can’t take care of Bobby.”

“An addiction,” Mother explained, “is when you can’t stop doing something that’s bad for you.” She was looking at our knees, which she always did when she was thinking about something else.

“Remember how you were peanut butter and jelly for Halloween?” our father had asked. “You can think of Bobby like ketchup now. He’s a part of our family, and we’re all in the same sandwich.” We didn’t ask him if he’d ever eaten a PB&J&K.

At first, we’d tried to help. Five days in a row, we called our aunt’s number from the old wireless phone in the office. After searching the dusty Professional Guide to Diseases on the basement bookshelf—Mother had spent a year in medical school before she became pregnant with us—we left urgent messages: “Aunt Amelia, we’ve all got salmon-ella. Come quick.” And: “Aunt Amelia, Cousin Bobby has… sepsis. You have to take him home right now.”

We looked up “addiction,” too, in the fraying American Heritage Medical Dictionary, finding other words we understood less: “compulsion,” “dependence.” You could be addicted, it said, to a thing or a behavior. Not like brushing your teeth, which was good, but to something else. Television, maybe. We wondered what Aunt Amelia was addicted to.

In June, our parents decided Cousin Bobby could babysit us for the summer.

“A perk,” our father explained. “No need for Mrs. Hatchett to come over.”

Mrs. Hatchett would arrive with a giant bag of old pretzels and make us eat them until our parents left. Then she’d sink into the den sectional, snoring through loud reruns of Judge Judy until the sound of the garage door in the evening roused her enough to welcome our parents home again. When Mrs. Hatchett was sleeping, we could do what we wanted—explore the creek at the back of our property, mix unexpected ingredients with ice cream (bananas, sage, peach jelly), tell scary stories in the basement.

Cousin Bobby wouldn’t let us leave the house without him. He said the ice cream was “off limits.” He came with us to the basement, but the stories he told were boring—armies with complex military strategies, kingdoms under siege and running out of food, superheroes always struggling against the same villains. When we told him we didn’t want to listen to them anymore, he pried the eyes off our stuffies in revenge. Mother glued them back, but then they were crooked so that when we arranged them in rows, they seemed confused or dizzy.

Two afternoons after that, we got the sharp scissors from Mother’s sewing kit and cut up Cousin Bobby’s spiderman pajamas. First we cut hamburger-ways, slicing right across at mid-thigh, then hotdog, up through the loose elastic waistband, so that there were four pieces.

When Cousin Bobby found them in his dresser drawer that night, he went wild. We could hear him through the walls, his preteen voice cracking. Mother sewed the pajamas back together, although her red thread was a different color. Then she came into our room, angry. We pointed to our stuffies.

“It’s not the same,” she said, her mouth a thin line. “Bobby is struggling.” She looked at us intently. “He’s sad.”
We picked up two matching cross-eyed rabbits.

Mother softened. “Just be kind to him. Even when he’s unkind to you. Bobby acts out because he’s looking for his place. When he finds it, I know you’ll be friends. Just wait.”

Sometimes adults make promises of things they want to be true—as if the declaration alone could make it real. We knew better.

“Cousin Bobby doesn’t belong with us,” we explained, picturing him pacing around our house—searching, scraping, damaging.

“Oh, sweeties.” Mother said. “I know it’s hard.” The lines on her forehead twitched. “But where else would he go?”

***

Our parents may have rolled the pocket door back into the wall, but when they left for work the next day, Cousin Bobby pulled it out again. We could see the marks he’d cut in the night while everyone was sleeping.

With one hand on the door’s thin frame, he set to it again—barefoot and in his Frankensteined Spiderman pajamas—digging lines into the beautiful petals, prying splinters from the rough section, flaking wood onto the floor. “I’m making a map,” he said, as if that were an explanation. The sounds of his work echoed through our old house.

We didn’t like Cousin Bobby mauling our new pocket door, but at least his attention was drawn from our stuffies, our bedposts, the ancient rocking horse, and us. To test our newfound freedom, we scooped out mountains of cold raspberry ripple, eating them with celery sticks for spoons. Cousin Bobby just kept carving.

It reminded us of when we’d taken Cousin Bobby to the creek. We’d introduced him to the grumpy snapping turtle, showed him the vines that had grown strong enough to swing on, and pointed out the best climbing trees. He threw stones at the turtle, jumped on the thick vines, laughing, until they broke, and carved his initials into every tree. He pretended to be Godzilla while he ruined the dam of rocks and sticks we’d been constructing for weeks.

So we lured him to the mud bank, pointing. “Look, Cousin Bobby,” we’d said. “Look here.”

Gleeful, he’d run and nearly jumped, plunging knee-deep into the brown, sucking mud. We tittered from our favorite tree as he struggled, wrenching his legs free to discover the pit had eaten his sandals. He had to sink his naked, wriggling toes into the boggy mud over and over until he could finally pull himself onto the grass, panting. For half an hour—and with a variety of long sticks—Cousin Bobby searched in vain for his sandals, brushing mud onto his face as he tried to keep us from seeing his tears. The next day was when he locked us in the attic.

Cousin Bobby carved away at the door, snaking lines into his map—trenches running through the strange patterns. To us, they just looked like damage. Outside, the wind picked up. The porch whistled with it, and the chimes we bought for mother’s birthday clanged against one another. Small pieces of wood toppled around a pile at Cousin Bobby’s feet, seesawing wildly when they hit the hardwood. The house groaned. One little chunk rocked back and forth, and then, somehow, shivered out a single long sliver, which poised itself nearly upright against the pile, sticking straight into the air.

We stopped eating our ice cream to watch more closely.

Cousin Bobby was prying the point of his knife deeper into the door’s rough center when he flopped his big toe down directly on top of the splinter.

He cried out, toppling backward to pull the bottom of his foot into view. Two fat drops of blood fell to the floor as he groped at the skin under his toe, failing to grip the end of the sliver, which had wiggled its way deep into his flesh. He even stuck his own knife point into the small hole, digging just a little in hopes of finding the piece of our house that was now firmly lodged inside him.

When our parents came home, they cooed over Cousin Bobby’s toe, feeding him Tylenol and propping his foot up on the ottoman. They made us bring him dinner on a tray. While we sat with mother and father at the kitchen table, we could hear him in the den, mouth full of lasagna, watching Battle Bots crash into each other. Although it was nice to be alone with our parents again, it wasn’t fair that Cousin got special treatment since he only had himself to blame.

That night, Mother dragged an upholstered dining room chair to block the door’s opening. “Don’t touch,” she said to Cousin Bobby, like he was a toddler.

Cousin Bobby usually stayed up for family TV time, dumping a solidifying river of chocolate shell sauce over two scoops of vanilla, then cracking the crust into a million pieces during Stargate. Instead, he kept looking in the direction of the door. When we all settled into our couches in the den, he hobbled stiffly to his room, injured foot heel-down, toes pointed to the ceiling.

Before bed, we padded to the basement to look at the old photo album. Maybe something in the pictures could tell us where Aunt Amelia had gone, like the clues in Carmen Sandiego. The sticky corners were coming unglued from some of the pages, leaving behind dark orange imprints. The photos they had held were bunched near the books’ binders, so we pulled out the Polaroids one by one. Mother and Aunt Amelia as children, in matching dresses like us, although Aunt Amelia was younger. Shiny white shoes, yellowed with time. Pigtails growing into long, loose manes as we turned the pages. Bellbottom jeans, wide, boxy cars, everyone wearing sunglasses so that we couldn’t study Aunt Amelia’s eyes. Baby Bobby with a toothless smile. Mother held him next to Aunt Amelia, who looked at something beyond the camera. Then, just us—the colors were better now—arranged in frilly dresses next to white wicker chairs, posing near hydrangeas, holding plastic pumpkins in matching costumes. At the end, one old photo was out of place, tucked between the empty last page and the back cover. A party scene—college maybe. People frozen mid-dance-move, everything the cloying orange of aging photographs—the muted colors of the past. Aunt Amelia stood in the middle of this crowd, the only one making eye contact with the camera, a cup in her hand.

She was never coming back for Cousin Bobby.

When our stationwagon rolled out from the garage the next morning, Cousin Bobby limped from the bay windows back to the threshold between the kitchen and the den, nudging the upholstered chair away with his knees. He pulled the door from its cavity.

“Cousin Bobby,” we said, putting on our mother’s voice to tease him. “Don’t touch.”

When he didn’t respond, we considered going to the creek. Our dam needed repair, and we could dig up worms around the bank to feed the snapping turtle.

But Cousin Bobby looked different now. Deep pillow lines engraved his cheeks. His calves stuck out from his faded pajamas like toothpicks, pale and fragile. His shoulders hunched forward, curling, spoonlike, over his chest. In his pocket, the outline of the knife.

The house pulsed. A whisper rode on the air, thick with door dust. In the kitchen, the refrigerator thrummed.

Cousin Bobby knelt in front of the door, then, instead of taking out his knife, raised his palm and pushed it straight onto the rough center, pressing his soft skin onto the sharp pattern.

“Cousin Bobby,” we said in our normal voices now, “stop. Don’t touch.”

He didn’t seem to hear us. We waved our hands between his face and the door. Nothing. We poked his cold skin. No response.

We finished our ice cream while considering the problem. Snitching was wrong. We’d never told our parents how Cousin Bobby trapped us in the attic, even when they’d discovered the nails in the ladder door. Cousin Bobby didn’t belong in our family, but that didn’t mean we wanted him to get hurt. We just wanted him to leave.

We called Mother from the office phone. “Cousin Bobby’s touching the door,” we said.

Mother sounded busy. “Hi babies. Just tell him to stop.”

“Something’s wrong,” we said.

A keyboard clacked. “We’ll deal with this when your father and I get home,” Mother said. “Tell Bobby to stop or he’ll be in big trouble.”

We relayed this to Cousin Bobby, who just kept pushing his palm into the door. The splintered pattern swirled in our vision, and the border of roses seemed fuller somehow, as though the wooden flowers were blooming. They waved when we blinked, beckoning, and although the call wasn’t for us, we still felt its pull. Outside, a woodpecker tapped its beak into a tree, but from inside, the sound was muted—distant—like someone knocking at the end of a long hallway.

We retrieved the old quilt from the bed in Cousin Bobby’s room, then wrapped it carefully around his thin shoulders. Sitting near him on the firm sectional, we waited, watching, fascinated.

Cousin Bobby was still kneeling like this when our parents returned from work, gasping as they peeled him, sallow and glassy-eyed, from his fixpoint. Mother cried, holding a kitchen towel against Cousin Bobby’s bleeding hand. She rocked him in her arms, his long legs splayed out on the hardwood like a forgotten marionette.

***

In the emergency room, the lights were too bright. Babies cried, machines beeped, and a poorly-calibrated automatic door opened when people near it shifted in their seats, thrusting humid air around the waiting room. We missed the stillness of our house.

When they finally called for Cousin Bobby, Mother stayed with us. She leaned over, one long arm draped along the back of our uncomfortable chairs.

“What will happen to Cousin Bobby’s splinters?” we asked. Maybe it was serious.

“He’s going to be okay,” Mother said, squeezing our shoulders with her long arm.

“What if they don’t get all the splinters out?” We asked. “Could they go to his heart?”

The bright lights made Mother’s face look old. “Oh, sweeties,” she said, “there’s nothing to worry about. Our bodies either push foreign objects out or form a protective layer. Like a little house.” Mother kissed the tops of our heads. “It’s called a granuloma. The body’s defense against any foreign thing that causes persistent damage.”

Someone crossed their legs near the automatic entrance, and it whooshed open, sending hot night air over our faces. 

“It’s incredible what our bodies do to keep us safe,” Mother said. “How they protect us from harm. The complicated ways they heal us.”

At home, Father found a 2x4 in the wood pile and nailed it longways over the door pocket. He stuck his fingers into the top of the gap and thumped the door against the board to test it. Then he rifled through bins in the basement until he found the bag of ancient silver keys.

At dinner, Cousin Bobby pushed his food around his plate, and afterward, he didn’t want dessert—even when Mother pulled the chocolate shell sauce from its secret hiding place behind the flour.

She made it dance in front of him. “Look what I’ve got, Bobby.”

They locked him in his room at bedtime.

***

That night, we dreamed about knives pushing into our ear canals and woke up sweaty to the sound of scraping metal.

Holding hands, we crept into the dark hallway to discover the noise was coming from the ancient lock on Cousin Bobby’s door.

“Cousin Bobby,” we whispered.

“I can’t pick it,” he said, and we realized he was using his pocketknife. “Let me out,” he said, “please.” Then, “I have to go to the bathroom.” We knew he was lying.

The key lay on the hardwood in the middle of the hall, where it had fallen when Cousin Bobby pushed his knife into the lock. We picked it up. Outside, the sound of an owl. The house vibrated as the air came on. Cousin Bobby’s eye stared through the keyhole.

“Let me out,” he said again, louder.

“Pass your knife under the door,” we said.

He hesitated. “Why?”

When we turned to leave, the knife slid to a stop at our feet. The handle was black plastic, worn and flaking at its curves. Lighter than we expected. We opened the blade, then touched our fingers to it, gently, without injury. Sometimes the wrong thing, we were realizing, was better. Of course, we couldn’t deny our own wants—the mystery of the door, explored by Cousin Bobby like a miner’s canary. Lastly, the complicated ways of our house, pulsing around us with its sonic heartbeat.

We put the key in the lock.

A light flipped on in our parents’ room across the hall. We darted back to our bed and threw our heads against the pillows, trying to look peaceful as we heard our door crack open. We fell asleep before we could remember to go back.

 In the morning, Mother changed Cousin Bobby’s bandage in the kitchen.

“I could stay home this week. Would you like that?” she asked him.

Cousin Bobby shook his head.

“We could all play Monopoly,” Mother said, “or just watch movies in our jammies.” He stiffened.

Father fumbled with his tie as he walked into the kitchen. “It’s nailed shut now,” he said. “Crisis over.”

Mother retreated to the dining room, motioning for us to follow. “Call me again,” she whispered, “if anything happens.”

The moment the station wagon left our driveway, Cousin Bobby was searching the garage for the toolbox. He came back with a hammer and pried each of the six nails from the 2x4, dropping them on the floor next to his bare feet.

When the last nail came loose and the board fell from the wall, the door—as if it had been oiled—slid noiselessly from its hollow. We remember how the damaged crosshatching seemed to swim in the morning light, rippling, mercurial, and strange. The rose border was in full bloom now, petals curling over themselves and around thorns that had sprung from the vines overnight.

Cousin Bobby unwound the new bandage from around his hand to reveal a jagged row of stitches, bruised green and purple. The door loomed over him, large and pulsing. Standing there, he seemed like some mutant creature from another dimension, lost or misplaced in this story, waiting at this portal to be returned.

Cousin Bobby let the bandage fall to the floor, then took off his pajamas—first his shirt, picking it from the middle like a tissue to pull it over his head—then the worn Spiderman pants, raising his twig legs through each hole. He stood there, nearly naked, underwear crumpling around his skinny hips.

The doves that nested in the eaves cooed like they always did in the mornings, claws scratching as they inched along the gutter edges.

Leaning forward, Cousin Bobby pressed his pale cheek against the rough crosshatching, like he could listen to the heartbeat of our house. Sharp spines split the tender skin around his cheekbone like a soft cheese. Blood pooled above his lip, then spilled down his mouth, dripping from his chin to the hardwood. The early light tumbling through the windows turned everything a distorted, dreamy yellow.

We whispered his name, but Cousin Bobby didn’t seem to hear us. His body relaxed, eyelids closing, and he pressed—each one in turn—his hands, his torso, pelvis, and legs against the door. The wood accepted his thin frame as he pushed himself into it, his body sinking deep into the splintered patterns.  We recognized it then, the map he had been carving. Its familiar, comforting shape—the impulse. It was calling for Cousin Bobby, but we were not immune to its dark, good purpose.

With the smallest nudge, the door receded quietly into the belly of our house.

Reverently, we gathered the nails from the floor, sending them swiftly through the same holes our father had made in the 2x4.

We picked up Cousin Bobby’s pajamas, packing them into his backpack with other vital things—his frayed toothbrush, new sneakers, the pocketknife. With the longest, heaviest log from our dam at the creek, we pressed the bag deep into the mud pit.

Our parents took weeks off work, put up signs around the neighborhood: Runaway Teen: Have You Seen Me? Robert: goes by “Bobby.” The police searched hard the first month.

We placed little tea lights, pretty stones, and our favorite earrings on a folded doily next to the door in the wall.

Misty-eyed, our mother folded her arms around our shoulders. “I miss him, too,” she said. “This is a beautiful tribute. But why not move it to the credenza?”

The shrine stands in the den even now, on an entryway table veiled in candlewax. From that summer morning and always after, even as the sun spills through the old paned windows, the house has been a little dimmer. Something chokes in the air—little speckles that shimmer in lightbeams but are otherwise invisible. We live here still, moving through the dust, our old bones creaking like the house. We sweep and polish and make what repairs we can when necessary.

A rusted nail fell from the board this morning. We are sitting together at the big bay windows, watching lizards dart into the prickly holly bushes, wondering if we should replace it.

about the author

L. Richardson tends her many philodendra in Houston, TX, where she teaches at Rice University. Her fiction has been published in Southern Indiana Review, and her scholarship has appeared in Textual Practice, The Harold Pinter Review, and The Many Facades of Edith Sitwell.

About the Artist

Bríd Moynahan is a graduate of the Crawford college of Art and is living in Newmarket, county Cork. She is currently a member of Cork Printmakers where she specialises in etching and paints in her studio in North Cork. Her work is semi-autobiographical. She is interested in the slightly surreal exploration of narratives derived from personal life, fairy tales and conversations. She likes to experiment with scale to help create a playful approach to serious themes. Her themes often include childhood innocence and a coming of age.