The house that Jerry built

/ Editor, Witcraft

This piece was written for the Six Sentence Challenge, with the prompt word of ‘structure’. What the hell it means I have no idea. 😉

To describe what Jerry had built as a ‘structure’ strained the definition to breaking point and made Escher’s multi-dimensional fantasies seem like a housing project blueprint in comparison.

The foundations, to the extent that they existed at all, consisted of a tissue of lies laid haphazardly on top of the quicksand of his adolescent fantasies of transcending his mundane suburban origins.

The walls seemed like Japanese-style internal sliders but were made of little more than recycled pizza boxes covered in a decoupage of graduation certificates, attendance records, little athletics participation ribbons and degrees purchased from the Oxbridge Online University.

The floors (or, more correctly, flaws) comprised remaindered books rescued from a rubbish skip, including ‘The Wit and Wisdom of Donald Trump’, ‘1001 Ways With Tripe’ and ‘Brain Surgery For Dummies’.

The doors had been salvaged from building site toilets that had reached their use-by date, complete with graffiti of historical significance on the insides, such as ‘Call Samantha for a good time’, ‘Quinoa causes cancer’ and ‘Gravity sucks’.

Immediately after its completion, with a roof consisting of knitted strands of titanium barbed wire designed to both deter pigeons and block the mind controllers, Jerry invited architectural prophets to review his edifice and their words are written on the Subway walls.

38 thoughts on “The house that Jerry built”

  9. …and it was proclaimed the structure of the century by those with more money than sense! You’ve summed up the con artist – or thr the UK parliament!
    (Sorry for ignoring you for a couple of weeks. My laptop reacted unjustifiably badly to the vup of tea I threw over it!)

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  12. Hey! I’ve lived there!

    (Full Disclosure: rented a place like that, except it being a 3rd floor walk-up in a niceness-challenged neighborhood two liquor stores and a discount bakery away from grad school.)

    Of course, the measures of the distance between there and here, like the …eclectic material choices of your protagonist, are found only in the lost-and-found room of my personal history… lol

    like the old saying suggests: ‘…to the young and imaginative, everything is a canvas or scaffold to hold an immature masterpiece.‘

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    • Full disclosure. One day I’m going to steal that line about ‘the lost-and-found room of my personal history’. Tried to find a source for your old saying without luck. If that’s an original of yours, bravo, (but I’m stealing that as well). 🙂

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