Someone loved this old house, this tumble down space of bright coloured walls and old mouldering carpet. A family lived here. Quarrelled, loved, just got on with things, but the house kept them contained, safe from the weather, kept everyone together.
The house was decorated regularly, changed, the layers of peeling wallpaper tell the story. Plain paint in the early years, when the walls were probably stripped and prepared properly for the next round of colour, then the painted over geometric shaped wallpaper of the seventies, just showing under a floral covering of grey tulips, last the modern bold wallpaper that someone unwisely thought was going to make the place look modern and saleable.
All that wallpaper and paint falling away in layers, making the observation feel like a geological study of the layered cliffs of the beach. In this layer note the fossilized shells from 200,000 years ago, caught and preserved in the hardening mud, lifted up out of the sea by some earthquake or other.
Someone had cleaned and polished this house. This had been the pride and joy of a mother with a growing family, a long time ago, a father that tried out his home handy man skills, a wall unit he made for his wife proudly holding its own against the inevitable destruction. On a wall there were marks humbly showing the progress of children's growth, each dated and with the name of the child written in scrawl. The wall hung sideways, flapping in the wind. Detached from the house, as were the children it recorded.
The yellow monster reached out it's arm and casually pulled at the wall at the heart of the house. The timber crashed inwards as the onlookers cheered. Dust that would have made the housewife despair rose around the wreck and covered its death throes from view.
The house was finally released from exposing its inner life to the world.
Somewhere a ghost cried with relief.
It was over.