Rooms in a Haunted House

By Adam McOmber

Dining room. Billiard room. Solarium. A room with wax figures. A proper state of feeling. A chapel covered in blood. You’ve heard me say that every suppressed fantasy of this kind has a tendency to escape into a childhood scene. A room where all the furniture is made of dust. A room where all the furniture is made of longing. Black and yellow tapestries. A painting of the underworld. The Egyptian Room. The Chicago Room. A room that has become excessively strong. Two rooms that are exactly alike. A room with a large mirror. A copy of Kraft-Ebbing’s Psychopathia Sexualis. The smell of an apple orchard. A room without a floor. A room without a ceiling. A room that contains a field of corn. The rows go on and on. Something weird and intolerable. The natatorium. A secret vault. A copy of Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle. A second house inside the house where a little family lives. When I was young, my step-brother and I would practice making out. We would sit on his bed and kiss. He was blond and very handsome. He played basketball. A room where a dead person walks back and forth all night. Anxiety. The possibility of Ohio. The study. The smoking room. A room where the hero is left unconscious and bleeding. Ideal homosexuality. A pathological defense. A room in a red brick high school. An old paper dug out of a drawer. Psychic substitutions. A room full of moonlight. A room that never stops making a certain sound. It is difficult to explain what it was like to grow up gay in a small midwestern town in the 1990s. How awful it felt every day. A room full of dark clouds. A room full of water. A pale room where it’s hard to breathe. Intellectual uncertainty. What else should I say?

About the Author

Adam McOmber is the author of three queer novels as well as three collections of experimental short fiction. He is co-chair of the Writing Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts as well as Editor-in-Chief of the literary magazine Hunger Mountain.