The house was a piece of shit.

Though Donald had to admit it was not as rancid of a piece of shit as he expected. He’d polished more offensive turds than this in his life. Such was the nature of investment house flipping.

Donald brushed crumbs from his polo to scatter on the floorboard, reached into the greasy bag on his passenger side for another egg roll. He chewed as he considered the scope of his newest project through the windshield. He had intended to eat inside as he surveyed the property. He had abandoned that thought moments after rattling down to the end of its dilapidated drive.

If he wanted to wax poetic (which he did) about the palatial manor, he would have described it as a mid-century monstrosity looming over a town that had otherwise moved on with its life. Ranks of standardized suburban homes swept out in solid waves in its shadow, waiting to colonize the land it occupied like so much fungal carpet over an elephant’s corpse.

That thought gave him pause. Were there mushrooms in Africa? If so, why didn’t they eat those instead of begging Americans to buy them goats on late-night informercials? For that matter, wasn’t there a lot of meat on elephants nobody was capitalizing on?

He shook his head. That was an unprofitable tangent. Unprofitable when considering the amount of work that he needed to get done.

And, fuck, if it didn’t look like a long road to hoe. He’d hoed a road or two before, but this was a horse of a different color.

He scowled and chided himself for mixing metaphors as he scribbled in his notebook, making a list of what he needed to prioritize. He filled a page and a half before frustration won out, and he wrote “EVERYTHING” in all capital letters.

He stared at the word. Underlined it. Circled it twice. It made him feel no better.

Re-paint exterior? Could the greasy scales of gray and maggot white flecking the ancient wood even be called paint, or had the house shed its skin at some point? Repair the veranda? What veranda? The awning and planks skewed drunkenly off to the side in a slow collapse. It looked like his grandfather having a stroke. An accurate analogy if he’d ever thought of one: The dust-choked panes of glass that passed for windows looked like cataracts. What was left of the shingling on the roof looked like a bald scalp dominated by liver spots. Donald was sure that if this house wore pants, there was a fresh log in them as well.

Jokes aside, the turret at the northeast corner was sure to have bats in it if nothing else. He was certain he’d seen at least one flickering shadow in one of its broken-out windows.

The seller had assured him that its plumbing and wiring had been redone as early as ‘65, but that was cold comfort at best, even if it was true. A part of him suspected that once power was restored to it, the whole thing would burst into flames to be petty.

At almost the same time as he had that thought, he watched as a shutter on a third-story window flapped in the breeze and snapped off its hinge. It kicked up a cloud of dust as it dropped to the ground; A dramatic, spiteful gesture.

“Oh, yeah,” He muttered, “Screw you too.”

But! Bitching and moaning to himself was not going to change the situation. He had sunk most of his savings into this trash pile already, convinced that it would be the greatest Flip of his career. Potentially even the last. The words “tens of millions” had played at the forefront of his mind that night. He wanted to reach back through the veil of time and smash the empty bottle of Riesling that had inspired past Donald over his stupid head.

It was fair to say he had lipsticked uglier pigs, but two hundred grand was one expensive swine. He hoped it would pay off when he brought home the bacon.

No, he only had to do what he’d done a dozen times before: Bear down, roll up his sleeves, and polish this thing up enough that the next buyer wouldn’t realize what a garbage fire it was until it was already too late.

He tossed the empty bag of Chinese takeout into the back seat to join the fast food mass grave piled there and swung himself out of his car. He couldn’t help but note the involuntary grunt that escaped him as he did so. Maybe he was getting fat, as his mother kept insisting.

Or not. He didn’t even get winded as he marched through the lawn gone to seed, up the creaky front steps, and into the slack-jawed mouth of the beast.