We sweep litter off the bed almost every night. It sticks to the bottoms of our ever-moist feet and follows me into bed. We sweep it into the crack between the bed and the wall. It will bind and, one day, I think, form a wall of its own.
We won’t even notice it, as if it’s always been there. I will look at it and say, “Do you remember when we bought the house and this grainy wall was here? I do. That was so long ago.” It will become so much a part of the house that even strangers will not notice it. They will look at it and think to themselves, this has always been here. I can feel it. I feel like I’ve been here before a thousand times.
The wall will become sentient, I imagine, for something that can so easily build itself must have a mind of its own. I’m sure that someone, somewhere, could use it to prove god’s existence. I don’t want to hear it, whatever it is.
I’m sure the wall will fall on us one day, its structural integrity tested by the subtle shifting of the bed. That is the fate of the wall. Every wall seems to be fated to do so eventually. Even the greatest masons build walls that are made to crack and split when the earth shifts. My bed is the earth at night. That wall is the gravity-defying tectonic plate that predicts the violent breaking of my Pangaea.
I sleep with my mouth open on most nights. I think that my sleeping self wants to breathe in the whole house. The ammonia smell of cat piss and the layers of dust I’ve let build up in my years of haunting these 1200 square feet.
The litter wall will fall into my mouth while I sleep, expanding like pastina in my saliva, filling my throat until the last needle of breath escapes through the last hole in the pipe of my body.