The Guest Room

The Guest Room begins as an unremarkable, almost forgotten part of the mid-century bungalow that Nightbitch had once found charming, convincing her husband they needed to live there despite its questionable wiring and single bathroom. The house itself, built by a builder who didn't know how to build, is full of odd angles, doors that are all too narrow or too short, and corners that are never right angles. No matter how much she cleans, the place never feels clean, and this room—like the rest of the house—becomes a source of her growing anger. Yet it is here, in this imperfect space, that the most significant transformations of her life unfold.

A Room of First Retreat

The Guest Room first appears as a place of escape. After her husband returns from a week away for work, Nightbitch whispers to him that she thinks she should sleep in the guest room. She explains that she gets so angry now, at night, and that she thinks she just needs a good night's sleep. He doesn't respond. This quiet request marks the beginning of her physical and emotional separation from her husband, a retreat that will deepen over time. Later, when she wants to exit the family entirely—either to go to the coffee shop for the evening or to shut herself in the guest room and simply imagine art projects or outfits or a future vacation—she stays because it would be inconvenient for her husband and the entire family, as he puts it. The room, at this stage, is a fantasy of escape she cannot yet claim.

The Birth of the Tail

The Guest Room becomes the site of a crucial, grotesque event. After a fall that bruises her tailbone, Nightbitch discovers a swollen lump at the base of her spine, hot to the touch. She presses it, examines it in the mirror, tries to photograph it with her phone, and even attempts to tweeze a protruding hair, only to exacerbate the pain and cause the thing to seep. In frustration, she says "Fuck it" to no one and stomps to the closet in the guest room to retrieve a box of her old art tools. The pungent smell of paints, putties, and old glues calms her and transports her to those long hours alone, fingers dirty and sore. She finds a sharp X-Acto knife, washes it at the kitchen sink, holds it above a flame on the stove, and then traces the tip down the red lump in the bathroom. It oozes open, and she drains the fluid with a hot washcloth. When she looks again, the lump has deflated, and a flurry of hair pokes from the incision. The only word she can think to describe it is "tail." The Guest Room, with its stored art tools, thus facilitates the physical manifestation of her transformation.

The Studio and the Letters

The Guest Room is later renamed "the studio" by Nightbitch, and it becomes a cluttered, vibrant archive of her reclaimed self. The unmade bed holds many books: the Field Guide, a book on herb craft and the poison path, her grandmother's spell book in English found online at a rare-books site, a history of disruptive performance art, a book about textiles and costuming, and an instructional seller's manual for herbs. Digging deeper, one finds a pair of forgotten underwear, a single forgotten vibrator, and a dusty book about taxidermy. In the corners are a dirty orange yoga mat, foam blocks, a strong cloth strap, and a pile of nice rocks. On the walls hang pictures of dancers contorted in wondrous ways, photos of women dressed as her grandmother had, pencil sketches studying animals in motion—horse, dog, cheetah, bear—hex signs she made from childhood memories, an interior shot of a meat locker, and stills from extreme acts of art, including a woman giving birth in a storefront and an artist who shot himself for the sake of art. The closet door is ajar, spilling spools of thread, beads, buttons, skeins of cloth, more books, earth-tone paints, leatherwork tools, a trash bag of wool, and a tub of beeswax. On the desk sits a sewing machine, an entire galaxy of pins and needles and snips of thread, and a jar nearly full of dead bees. Hanging from the shelf above the desk are a dozen rabbits' feet, nearly cured, which have been there for two weeks. It is here, at this cluttered desk, that Nightbitch writes her letters to Wanda White, moving the sewing machine to the side for a time. She becomes quite religious during this period, rising each morning to see if there is a response and sitting down each night to write another missive to a person she believes in yet has no evidence of, save for the tattered book on her nightstand and a single contact page on a university website. When her husband asks to see the book she clutches to her heart, she refuses, saying she needs to write something first, and walks toward the guest room where her own laptop is located.

The Room That Devours

That month, Nightbitch begins to sleep in the guest room, her studio, whenever her husband is home. The room devours her, in fact, as soon as her husband returns from work, and she disappears until her husband and son run out of things to do and then puzzle over where Mama could be. She explains that she needs alone time, time to herself. At night, after her family is fast asleep, she wanders the night-inked streets, through tidy garden beds, through a thicket of lilac bushes where she strips herself of her clothes and grows her hair long, testing the strength of her elongating muscles. She sniffs at suspicious holes in the ground, sticks her head into the big ones, and comes out with grass hanging in her hair and dirt marking her face. She finds a leaky faucet and laps from the puddle beneath it. She spots a tabby cat and takes off in its direction with lightning speed. The Guest Room, once a place of imagined escape, becomes the launching point for her nightly animal excursions, the threshold between her human domestic life and her feral, liberated existence.

The Kennel and the New Order

The Guest Room's transformation is paralleled by changes elsewhere in the house, particularly the introduction of a dog kennel. When the husband returns home one week to find the kitchen orderly and clean, the bathroom shady and smelling of bleach, the beds made, and the carpets vacuumed, he also finds beside their bed a new kennel, bedded down with a soft throw blanket and a down pillow from the bed. There are no dirty clothes on the floor, no wayward toys strewn about. This kennel, which Nightbitch later drags from the living room up the narrow stairs into her bedroom, becomes the boy's sleeping place under the new "doggy rules." The Guest Room, meanwhile, remains her own private domain, the one space in the house that is not tidied for the husband's return but is instead allowed to remain a chaotic, creative, and transformative mess. The contrast between the orderly kennel and the cluttered studio marks the division of the household into the domesticated and the wild, with the Guest Room standing firmly on the side of the wild.

The Guest Room is thus far more than a spare bedroom. It is the physical embodiment of Nightbitch's inner life, the place where her artistic past, her maternal present, and her animal future converge. It holds the tools of her former self and the evidence of her new one, from the X-Acto knife that birthed her tail to the letters that connect her to Wanda White. It is the room that devours her, and in doing so, it allows her to become herself.