‘Bliss Street’ by CZ Tacks

Vanna found out she was a homeowner the same time she found out her dad was dead. The emotions evoked were complex, and she wasn’t gonna be the one to deal with them. She tweeted about it instead: Waiting for someone in your family tree to die and hoping they forgot to cut you out of their will is the only real millennial house-buying strategy. Then she threw an overnight bag into the boot of her car, cancelled her bookings, put up a Facebook post saying the tattoo parlour was closed for a few days, and drove to Melbourne to take a look. 

There was an evaluation from a real estate agent among the paperwork. It said things like genuine Edwardian architecture and completely untouched and a renovator’s paradise. Vanna interpreted this as a polite way of calling the place a real shithole. She’d grown up in the house. It had been a shithole then, and there was no world in which her dad would’ve improved it. 

She arrived on Bliss Street and found that not only had her dad failed to improve things, but he’d also made them significantly worse through abuse and neglect. “Guess we have that in common,” she said to the house, picking her way over the broken glass that littered the porch. The wind stirred the dry strings of dead ivy curled around the rusting eave brackets. Vanna decided this meant the house agreed with her. 

It was weird to be in the house by herself; weirder still to find that the furniture was gone. The house had been in Ma’s family for generations, and so had all the things in it that had been there when Vanna was a kid.