Foundations

I can see him clearly in my mind's eye. He has just settled down in his bedroom, a basement room with singularly unattractive green carpet and the coolness of eastern shadows - a place that was supposed to be a refuge - a place supposedly safely ensconced in his parents' dream home. And instead he finds himself staring at the ominous cracks in the wall. Cracks that don't need any metaphorical weight beyond their physical presence. They snake gracefully and menacingly up the southern wall, twining around the electrical socket like vines rising up to strangle out low-growing flowers. They are signs that the dream house is settling and subsiding like the weak and traitorous mud beneath it - slipping and canting to the side - taking with it the house and the dreams and leaving nothing but cracks.

The cracks in the wall would be painful enough if they were not accompanied by far worse - by emotional and mental turmoil that sent cracks and fissures through his mind and warned him that the dream house was not the only dream about to slide irretrievably into the sodden earth below.