If anyone has ever seen a house splitting at its seams, you know it's not pretty. The house itself is big and tall, but the paint has been peeling and cracking for decades. Everything inside the house is broken, but that's a secret because no one comes in. Finally, the internal pressure has become too strong for the simple edifice to hold it in. It has been loyal, this house. For nearly twenty years, it has tried to keep the sewage from leaking out. It has tried and tried to keep it together, it has tried to keep the secrets, it has tried and tried to hold the pain in. Oh, but a vessel filled with chemicals and corked is fated to blow apart. Didn't you learn that in school? With apologies to the family huddled inside its walls, the mother bridge standing and stretching, desperate to make a way for her children to cross the ferocious ocean, the children hiding beneath boulders of fear and agony, the Beast roaring at anyone who would dare cross over his territory, his infested waters, his ferocious ocean, the house lets out a breath. The threads that held it together, red now, stained with the blood of innocent people, rip apart without much warning at all. The house heaves and heaves, sides bulging, gassy secrets slipping through the widening cracks at four corners, impossible truths, big and swollen, bursting through the gaps left by severed stitches, monstrous evidence, screaming and calling, oozing out like pus from a diseased infection, it cannot hold on much longer, this house. It's ready to pop at any moment. You can see the seams splitting, you can see the secrets surfacing, you can see the siding suffering, hemorrhaging, the shingles tearing, showing signs of internal bleeding, the steps shaking and breaking, unable to be used, experiencing a stroke caused by a tumor, and you can no longer deny it. This house is splitting at its seams.