John crept quietly as he could up the cracked creaking stairs to the crazy crooked house, carefully stepping over the stair that wasn’t there. He used his sleeve to dust off the taped pane of the living room window. He leaned over the spilled vinyl records lying on the porch and peered into the book and newspaper-matrix that was the living room. There was Luke pretending to work on his novel in the middle of the chaos, in reality staring at the screen of his computer that wasn’t on. It wouldn’t have been surprising to see strings of gob reaching down from his chin to the keyboard: writer’s block stalactites. He could have been sitting there like that for weeks if an hour.

John tip-toed down to the end of the porch over pizza pie plates and empty bottles of water and craned his neck around and up like the girl in The Exorcist to see Matthew’s window. The light was on. Good. It meant he too was busy pretending to write his novel. In reality, John imagined, he must be hatching another plot to disrupt everyone else’s work. All it would take in John’s case is planted evidence that someone had gained access to his room (somehow avoiding the crouching monster biding time at the door) and peered through his computer files and at his own false starts to his novel.

John moved back to the front door and took nearly a full minute to twist the knob the half turn to pass the latch silently out of its hole and allow the door to swing open. The smell of spaghetti sauce immediately invaded his nostrils. That put Melanie in the kitchen.

One way of ejecting her from the house would be to dash into the kitchen, grab a knife from the drawer, and scream at her and wave the knife menacingly till she came to her senses and left of her own volition. Alternatively, he might sneak up behind her, thrust a bag over her head, grab her around the torso, and drag her down the hall, out the door and down the stairs, then, dropping her there, rush back up into the house and slam the front door shut again, being sure to lock it.

Neither plan held out the promise of durable regime change. Successfully ejecting Melanie from the house wouldn’t so much be a campaign of military might, but more a hearts and minds campaign, or more accurately, a heart and mind campaign, the heart and mind in question being Melanie’s. By clever diplomacy, he would have to lead her to making the conclusion seemingly on her own that it would be best for all involved if she walked. This would be tricky because the only reason she had to leave, as John had earlier in the day concluded, staring out the café window at the old woman picking one piece of fruit from a box at the grocery store, was her own preservation, it being threatened by the contraction of the disease that swarmed the house like fruit flies around a bowl of old fruit. Melanie didn’t see that there was a disease to catch here, despite the fact one inhabitant was in the living room at this very moment draining saliva over his switched-off keyboard, another was upstairs spending his God-given life plotting the destruction of his two housemates, while the third was creeping stealthily down the book-lined hall of his own house with visions of knives and US Special Forces rendition head bags running round his brain.

“Staying for dinner, John?” Melanie called out from the kitchen, not even turning around. “I’ve made spaghetti!” she chirped. “Leave,” replied John straightening up from his predatory stance as he entered the cone of light bathing the kitchen. Apparently creeping up behind someone wasn’t as easy as the movies made it out to be. He noted he would have to re-stage the murder of the Pope scene he had been writing in his head on the walk home. Perhaps a poison could instead be dissolved in the Pope’s nighttime glass of drinking water.

Luke, awakened, called from the living room, “I’m staying for dinner!”

From upstairs John could hear Matthew’s muffled distant voice shout something about “dinner,” followed by the sound of scrambling feet then thump-thump-thumps of those feet down the stairs. It was like a can of tuna were cracked by a can opener in a house full of cats.

A hot home-cooked meal in the crazy crooked house. It was a novelty, no doubt about it. But it complicated immensely the task John had before him: no one was likely to think it’d be a good idea to turf Melanie while their mouths were full of nourishing food Melanie had just cooked up.

“I was thinking,” John began after everyone had hurriedly inhaled a first placating stomach-full at the fresh kill site around the church door table. “This isn’t really a very healthful, not a very wholesome, environment around this house, is it.”

Matthew looked up as a snake of noodle whipped around and disappeared between his puckered lips. Luke also stopped mid-chew, his lips clownishly smeared red from sauce all the way around his mouth. It was as though it were the first time they had considered the question of whether it was healthy or not to spend 25 years cooped up in a crazy house trying to beat each other at writing a novel none of them were evidently capable of.

Melanie, who had earlier let the “Leave!” comment just hang there like a storm cloud encroaching her sun, was the only one not to look up, but instead stirred her sauce and noodles around and around her plate, a Katrina approaching weak dykes. She was expecting something like this. Pre-emption is the only solution.

“Look John,” Melanie dropped her fork and crossed her arms over the table, engaging his eyes with her own. “Cut the shit with the self-pitying. You can’t write, not yet anyway. Luke and Matthew are in the same boat. So you made a bad decision 25 years ago to lock yourselves up in here till one of you wrote a novel. I know people who made a decision to lock themselves up in a marriage, a career, whatever, for longer than 25 years with an ambition about it that came nowhere near the ambition you had in mind. You think it’s all about what you achieve, or fail to achieve. No. It’s about what you’re driven to do, it’s about what are trying to achieve. You have an idea, you have a plan, you have a goal in mind. Have you ever stepped back and taken stock of what kind of wealth that is? Have you once considered what it would have been like to have gone 25 years without even having a plan, without even having an idea? You try waking up not inside a room covered in notes and research, not in a house buried in books and newspapers, not inside a head brimming with ideas, but in an empty room, a barren house, a quiet head. Is that really what you would rather have done with these 25 years?”

The trouble with women is, John thought, they blunt all your best, most bitter complaints even before you state them as you had so studiously rehearsed. “Alright,” he said.

“Alright then,” Melanie concluded. She went back to her fork and spoon, as did Luke and Matthew. And John, too, eventually. No one was leaving the house.