#662 House Heart- Amelia Gray
A couple engage in a human pseudo-sexual experiment. They hire a prostitute who they convince to squeeze inside a vent in their home. The prostitute is skeptical but reluctantly agrees after being promised more money. Inside the walls they built a series of ducts where the prostitute can move around, kind of like a human-sized series of gerbil tubes. She is now trapped and frightened, but the couple tells her it is of her own choosing:
“I pointed out that she had made all the choices that brought her to that moment, that if she had been forced to do anything in her life, it had not been in our presence and we would not be held accountable.”
Days pass, with each person falling into a routine; the prostitute in the ducts, the woman in her house and the man going to work each day. Each with their own limitations, boundaries, and freedoms. It is in how we embrace these things that we label them, and if we don’t see them as boundaries, are they?
“…it was only natural that the girl had become comfortable with her surroundings. He reminded me that I had not challenged the boundaries of my own life in many years, nor had he challenged his own. Even though we feel quite free, he remarked, every life has its surrounding wall.”
This is a very dark, and provocative story, intriguing and scary. Thinking about walls and enclosures we build for ourselves, I am reminded of Hamlet’s statement:
“I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.”
You may argue that Hamlet’s prison was a mental one, and one of his own doing; the woman here is being physically imprisoned by others. True, but we all make choices that allow others to effect us. If we look at it with a wider angle lens, those lines seem smaller and less distinct. If we all live in a prison of ANY making, by denying it as a prison, or refusing to see it as a limitation, we take that power away. I guess the lesson here is: Either challenge the walls around you, or learn to live within them.
The more I think about this story, the more I love it.
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