The Devouring Wall

The black hole wouldn’t shut up, and it was the most uncomfortable conversation I’d had since my therapist asked why I hated my father. The thing lived in the wall like a talking tumor that had signed an eternal lease. At first glance, it looked like a stain—the kind of imperfection your brain registers but your consciousness prefers to ignore until one day you decide to clean it, and it swallows your rag as an appetizer. This stain had my father’s voice, not the affectionate version from edited memories, but the real one: the voice that knew exactly which words to use to make you feel like an existential failure. They say when you summon a dead person, a demon in cosplay answers. I hadn’t summoned anything. I just tried to clean a stain that turned out to be very hungry.

My father had died in that house three months earlier. His heart acted like all human organs: a perfect machine until the day it decides to retire without notice. He died right when his six cats discovered that loyalty has caloric limits. He was the victim of the most elegant irony ever documented: the miser who never shared a crumb ended up as a feline feast. With no salmon-flavored food available, the cats explored the freshest organic menu in the house. When I found him days later, he looked like the result of a gourmet focus group where participants rated the experience with strategically placed excrement in every room. That excrement contained digested paternal DNA—a lesson in biological recycling no Discovery Channel documentary could convey with such scatological precision. The bacteria declared independence like workers fleeing a burning factory, each seeking new corporate horizons outside the corpse.

The brain survives seven minutes after the heart gives up. Seven minutes of pure consciousness while your pets debate whether to start with the toes or go straight for the main course. I wonder if my father processed that his “little angels” were turning him into an early Christmas dinner, using the same methodology they applied to basement mice. Forensics never mention these details on CSI: how domestic cats develop butchery techniques that would make a Michelin chef specializing in offal blush.

The house was crumbling with the elegance of a democracy in terminal crisis. An underground river had turned the place into a clandestine botanical garden, sprouting tropical fruits—migrant seeds the water had collected on its illegal tour through the city’s pipes. Frogs croaked twenty-four hours a day without a union or schedule, leading an amphibian choir that threatened the mental health of any surviving distant neighbor. The vegetation devoured walls with the patience of a lawyer billing by the minute, while I dug through documents searching for property deeds to an inheritance that turned out to be more curse than lottery prize. The household dust—I realized with scientific horror—was my father’s dead skin cells covering the floor, the furniture, and floating in the air. Every breath was a forced communion with his year-old flaked epidermis, a family sacrament no church had ever prescribed.

It all began with my real-estate tantrum worthy of a reality show. Desperate not to find the legal documents, I shouted into the void: “Father, help me find those damn papers!” Silence was his response—a posthumous rudeness typical of his personality. I grabbed his bottle of reserve wine and smashed it against the wall, a poorly coordinated toast by the worst son of the year. Apparently, supernatural contracts are activated by domestic vandalism; the clauses are written in a language only the dead and phone company employees understand. Weeks later, that wine stain had evolved into something more sinister: a pulsating mold like a transplanted heart stuck to the wall, monitoring my vital signs while calculating the perfect moment for its debut in the theater of hereditary horror.

The stain grew following principles of viral marketing and aggressive corporate expansion. When I tried to clean it again, I felt it throb under the rag like a living organ processing information. Then it swallowed the cloth whole in an act of domestic phagocytosis that defied my basic knowledge of biology. I thought of rats—a rational explanation for irrational phenomena. Rats were understandable tenants with predictable habits. But rats don’t recite prophecies in your dead father’s voice with the specific tone he used to read overdue electric bills, so my scientific hypothesis had considerable methodological flaws. Plus, rats don’t usually know exact death dates or Social Security numbers.

I visited the house only during the day, fleeing before nightfall like a vampire with an office job. My wife had left town with our kids under the pretext of a “family visit”—a decision I now interpreted as high-level maternal premonition. Women detect supernatural dangers with military precision, though they curiously fail to spot abusive partners even when it’s obvious. I planned to use those days to liquidate my father’s library: volumes on cheap theology and obsolete civil engineering that no one would consult, useless wisdom awaiting its date with municipal recycling. But the wooden staircase had its own agenda. It broke under my weight, I grabbed the wardrobe, everything gave way, and an avalanche of useless knowledge buried me—a too-literal metaphor for toxic inheritances and defective furniture passed down from previous generations.

I woke up in absolute darkness, remembering my childhood: those nights when I’d wake up and walk down the hallway touching the walls, searching for the kitchen where my parents whispered about money and my uncertain future. Now, there was only one voice emerging from a hole blacker than the space between dead stars—a portal with 24/7 customer service and no return policy. Inside the void, a spiral spun hypnotically like a screensaver designed by demons with training in subliminal advertising. That night, I learned that domestic black holes ignore physical laws but strictly adhere to the rules of family terror: they feed on transgenerational guilt, grow by consuming family secrets, and collect emotional debts with interest rates that would make any loan shark pale.

My father had landed a job in the underworld’s HR department, reciting names and death dates with the efficiency of a government bureaucrat specializing in bad news. The old had imminent appointments; the young, more distant ones—a well-organized cemetery reservation system with irreversible consequences. Information poured from the hole like a tragedy vending machine: “Elena Rodríguez, eighty-two years old, next Thursday during the news. Roberto Silva, thirty-nine years old, car accident in December. Carmen López, seventeen years old, overdose on her graduation day…” Each name represented a biography that would end punctually according to the cosmic schedule managed by my dead father, now a mortality bureaucrat.

I tore boards from the windows seeking moonlight—the only illumination available in this paranormal theater of operations where the electricity had been cut off for non-payment to the cosmos. I needed the house and car keys to escape before my sanity submitted its final resignation. That’s when I spotted the figure: a completely bald head reflecting the full moon like a macabre disco ball, patrolling the perimeter without ever peering inside. It was a ghostly security guard fulfilling an eternal shift with employee-of-the-month dedication. The vegetation swallowed and spat it out at different coordinates, like a strategy video game played by nature using apparitions as tokens. Its steps made no sound, but the plants parted to form temporary paths that closed after its passage. Then I heard my name emerge from the hole, followed by a date. Distant, thank the universe. I breathed a sigh of relief until I heard the names of my wife and children. Same date for all. Today. The system had processed our files as a family package with a bulk discount.

When I finally escaped, I realized I’d left something fundamental behind in that house—possibly my last chance to pretend reality made logical sense. Something would keep growing, metabolizing family secrets, waiting with the infinite patience of supernatural phenomena and cell phone contracts. Domestic black holes have perfect memory and an updated database: they know your address, your wife’s name, your credit card numbers, and the exact date your lineage will end. Because some stains on the wall transcend their decorative nature—they’re portals to truths you’d rather ignore forever, managed by dead parents who finally found the perfect method to have the last word in every family argument, from the comfort of death and without paying utility bills. The hole is still there, waiting, whispering names into the void. And now it knows my new address.