Story: A Pox on All Your Houses... by Stephanie Campisi

I first encountered Steph Campisi’s writing while using it to fill potholes during my brief career as a stopgap during the early fifties. Steph understandably requested that I stop, and it’s fortunate for us both that we did, for that very night we encounterd a friendly bear who nursed us back to health and shared with us the precious secret of hibernation.

I think you can trace the events of those tumultuous years in the themes of Steph’s story for us:

pox.pdf

 

A Pox on All Your Houses: a tale of Singh and Daughter

 

Stephanie Campisi

 

 

 

Ravi Singh was a small, meticulous man who dressed only in colours that could be found in nature and drank tea that was properly steeped. He owned two side-by-side terraced houses, and each was painted in colours the inverse of the other. His daughter, Priyanka, had moved into the second house, declaring she needed space and independence. Of course, living next door to her parents was exactly the sort of independence Ravi thought Priyanka needed, so he was rather pleased with the arrangement, truth be told.

 

One morning, Ravi Singh was sitting on his verandah drinking a cup of properly-prepared tea and watching the rain sheet down before him when Priyanka hurtled into his front yard, looking rather dishevelled and not entirely proper.

 

“Dad!” she shrieked, “my house has a giant pimple! There is a boil on the ceiling!”

 

Ravi Singh sighed, realising that there was indeed a reason that his daughter was studying a worthless degree at a second-rate university, and these outbursts about pimples were only proof of it. He finished his cup of tea, and sedately followed Priyanka into the adjoining house.

 

His daughter stood in the hallway, dripping water on to the new parquetry, and pointed above her at a bulge in the ceiling. Ravi Singh removed his slippers and placed them by the door; then squinted up at the ceiling, which poked out like a pregnant belly.

 

Ravi Singh went to the kitchen and found the broomstick he had placed beside the fridge when he had decorated and furnished the house. He returned to the hallway and prodded at the bulge. It felt heavy and thick, and he was certain that the liquid that was causing the ceiling to distend was far more sluggish and viscous than water – it could not have been a simple leak.

 

“I’ll go to the doctor,” he said, and, taking an already damp and unclasped umbrella from the stand by the door, donned his slippers and headed down to Dr Spatter’s practice, which the doctor ran out of a tiny corner building that had once been the local post office. The waiting room, which was a tiny space comprising a few vinyl-topped chairs, a glass table covered with magazines dating from 1985 through to 1988, and the rather imposing desk behind which stood a particularly diminutive receptionist, was thankfully empty, as it was rather too early for the addled mothers of irritable toddlers to be up, and the elderly with their myriad complaints, who probably were indeed awake, had not managed yet to shuffle through the doors.

 

Dr Spatter stalked out of her consulting room, her manner brusque and abrupt, as usual. She was dressed in a tailored suit that could only be described as severe, and her hair was slicked back from her face in a manner that threatened the safety of her scalp.

 

“I need some acne medication, Doctor,” said Ravi Singh.

 

Dr Spatter raised a drawn-on eyebrow, and enquired as to the nature of this outburst.

 

“It’s for my daughter,” Ravi Singh hedged (although not untruthfully). “She has an enormous pimple – big enough that she does not want to leave the house.”

 

Dr Spatter muttered something about protocol and breach of practice, and pulled a large white tube from her pocket. “I can’t prescribe anything without seeing the patient, but I recommend this cream. It’s over the counter medi-”

 

Ravi Singh, ordinarily one for airs and pretences, had snatched the tube from the doctor and was already on his way back to Priyanka’s house.

 

“I need a paint brush,” he declared, unscrewing the cap of the white tube and staring intently at the pimple on the ceiling. Priyanka, student of a useless degree at a second-rate university, had quite a collection, and dashed to her studio to find one of appropriate size and coarseness. She returned with a large brush that looked not unlike a chimney sweep’s broom, and Ravi Singh finally realised just how his daughter managed to apply such unnecessary amounts of makeup each morning.

 

Ravi Singh coated the brush with the acne cream and attached it to the broom handle (quite the handyman was Ravi Singh). He dabbed at the enormous pustule that sagged from the roof, coating it thoroughly with the acne cream – or at least as well as he could, considering his rather small stature.

 

At last, pleased with his cosmetic work, Ravi Singh went to leave, but as he did so, the pimple visibly swelled, and then burst, soaking the fastidious Ravi Singh and the already dishevelled Priyanka with a yellowy-white gelatinous goo that had the consistency of custard and the tenacious sticking power of glue. The parquetry flooring for which Ravi Singh had paid substantial amounts of money was thickly iced like a rather distasteful cake.

 

Priyanka, her face a foul smear of pus, wiped at her eyes, and stared up at the ceiling. The ceiling was now perfectly concave, as though it bore an acne scar.

 

She pondered for a moment. “You know, Dad, I have a light sculpture that would look fantastic there.” She trotted off to her room, skating through the skin of muck coating the floor, and returned dragging a small ladder and carrying an oddly shaped light that resembled nothing so much as half an eyeball. She unfolded the ladder and confidently climbed it (Ravi winced in sync with the creaking and cracking noises that emanated from the sad frame with each small movement his daughter made). She lifted up the lamp, and settled it into the gap: it nestled there precisely, with its flat surface flush against the line of the ceiling.

 

“We just need somebody to wire it up,” Ravi murmured. His despair over the ruination of his neatly-pressed and rather expensive outfit fled as a far more primal urge overtook him: that of entrepreneurship. He stood still for a moment, pondering the ins and the outs of what could indeed become a particularly lucrative business (and one where he could offer his unemployable daughter with her useless degree at her second-rate university an actual paying position). He also did his best to recall everything he had learnt about pimples and how they were spread.

 

Ravi Singh began to frantically daub various walls and ceilings with the goo in order to determine whether his calculations as to the potency and spread of the house-pimples were indeed correct – and he was not wrong. Within half an hour, each room was veritably spotted with acne pustules resembling the first but for size and depth, depending on the amount of infected pus Ravi Singh had applied.

 

Rather soon, Priyanka had a collection of attractive down-lights nestling in the various gaps (a design with which she was most impressed).

 

“We must scoop up the pus!” Ravi Singh exclaimed, grinning, by now covered with pus, yet worrying only about the money that would soon be lining his pockets, and not a whit about the impending doom with which his complexion was faced.

 

And that is exactly what they did.

 

Very soon, Singh and Daughter were the prime ceiling-pustule creators and fillers in the Southern Hemisphere, and Priyanka forged a new path in light fitting and design, taking Swedish creators rather by surprise. What’s more, she married a neurosurgeon, and as far as Ravi Singh was concerned, things could not get much better than that.

 

 

—

 

Stephanie Campisi was born in the eighties, is unapologetically a child of the nineties, and feels vaguely anachronistic in the noughties.  Home is in the inner north-west of Melbourne, Australia, in a small flat where she spends less time than she probably should.  A recent graduate of the University of Melbourne, she now works as a publishing editor for a large company and is inordinately proud of not yet having flipped a burger of any description.  She spends far too much time mulling over apostrophes and syntactic ambiguities.  When not indentured within such admittedly self-imposed nerddom, her free time is spent rather unevenly between her much-loved book collection, Melbourne’s bars, and, occasionally, the odd cafe, where she masquerades as a writer of sorts whilst staring pensively out of a window.  Her work has appeared, or is slated to appear, in magazines such as Fantasy Magazine, FarThing, and Shimmer, and anthologies including In Bad Dreams through Eneit Press and Paper Cities through Senses Five Press. She is currently writing her first novel.  You can find her online at http://misapostrophication.blogspot.com/; a full bibliography can be found at http://campobiblio.blogspot.com/

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