Karma kitty's Arc

Chapter 1 of 8

Karma walked into willow court neighborhood searching for a house. She stood under the neighborhood arch, the willow leaves carved in gold above her, and she continued through the neighborhood. Trees of amber, brown, orange, purple and red were amongst old Victorian houses. Karma Kitty saw the house before she saw the red sign in its window. A two-story Victorian, brick gone dark, paint peeling, shingles black. Broken glass in the frames. Wildflowers had swallowed the porch rail. Every window looked like a shut eye. She knew she wanted it. The little red sign said one word she should have feared: DEMOLITION. She read the auction rules three times. The city would knock the house down unless someone bought it and fixed it. To Karma, the ruin was the whole point. She built dark, whimsical things. She wrote and made 3D meshes late into the night with a black cat named Catpocino curled beside her. This house could become the strangest, most beautiful home she had ever owned. If someone else bid higher, it would be gone forever. The bid went in at the city hall, down in a stone-walled cellar that served as the record library. Arched ceilings. Books in shadowed alcoves. A clerk stood at a tall wooden catalog, half-buried in loose slips of paper, and looked more like a librarian monk than an official. Karma slid her folded bid across the counter. Her hand shook. "Silent auction," the clerk said, not looking up. "You won't know until you know." "How long?" Karma asked. "Three months. Higher bids beat yours. We don't call to say you lost." She stamped the slip and dropped it in a drawer. "Only if you win." So Karma waited. She kept the address written on a card by her bed. Some nights she opened a new mesh file and modeled the porch from memory, then closed it, afraid to hope. Catpocino slept in a box of her canned mocha coffee. Weeks passed. No letter came. Then, on a gray afternoon, an envelope arrived stamped with the city seal. She opened it standing up. Inside sat a single folded page and, beneath it, thicker paper with her name printed in bold. The deed. Her bid had been the highest. The house was hers. Karma drove there before she even finished reading. She walked up the cracked path through the wildflowers. Her key turned in the swollen door, and the smell hit her first, wet wood and mold and something older. Broken glass crunched under her boots. Water stains ran down the walls. It was worse than she remembered, and she loved it. Then she saw the paper nailed to the wall inside. Stark red and black. WARNING. VIOLATION. DEMOLITION NOTICE. The city had posted it before the sale. It listed a deadline. If the house failed inspection by that date, they would tear it down anyway, deed or not. She had won the house. Now she had a countdown to save it.