gut as I exit the truck and make my way up to the front of the house, where more graffiti adorns the front door.
Abandon hope all ye who enter here.
An obnoxious creaking chases the opening of the door, as I push against those threatening words scrawled across the panels. The moment I peer inside, another snapshot fires off inside my head, and the drab dilapidated interior before me morphs into the colorful visuals of my past.
“Maw Maw Day is dropping the three of you off and picking you up, right?” My father sits at his desk, adjusting the glasses that slipped down his nose, while hovering over piles of paperwork. “And you’ll be staying the night at their house?”
“Yes.” Standing before his desk, I wring the hem of my shirt, waiting for him to hand me the cash.
“What movie do you plan to watch?” He doesn’t look up at me once as he asks me questions and scribbles something onto the pages below his nose.
“Just a … kids’ movie. Rated PG.” Guilt winds inside my stomach as the lie tumbles from my lips. In truth, Brie’s older sister is coming with us, to buy the tickets for an R-rated horror movie my best friend somehow talked me into. One where a family is terrorized by a mask-wearing group that hunts them while vacationing at their weekend estate.
Thankfully, he still doesn’t look up at me, because I can’t bring myself to lie to my daddy’s face. Instead, he reaches into his back pocket and draws out his wallet, offering up a twenty-dollar bill. When I reach out to grab it, he snaps the cash back, and his eyes finally meet mine.
“You got the pepper spray?”
With a nod, I tug the small bottle from my pocket and hold it up for him to see. My father insists that I carry it everywhere, even if I think it’s the dumbest thing ever. I hate the way it bulges out of my pants.
“Good. No talkin’ to any strangers, hear? No one. No one knows who you are, or where you live. Clear?”
“I promise.”
The stern look in his eyes from before softens only a little. “I want to give you the freedoms of a normal childhood, Cely, but you must be careful.”
“I know.”
A quick jerk of his hand, and he passes over the cash, and the victory explodes like fireworks inside of me. I’ve only been allowed to the movies a couple times with just me and Brie, and those occasions took a whole lot of coaxing from Maw Maw to change his mind, but this time? I have a feeling it’ll be the best night ever.
The memory slips away, like all the others, and once again, I’m staring off at the surrounding destruction.
Grit, garbage and broken wood lay scattered across the floor, the gravely surface crunching beneath my boots. The walls have been stripped of the paintings I recall hanging throughout the house, spray paint graffiti now in their place. More bible verses in black. Curse words scribbled over them in red. It looks like a war between good and evil inside this house.
Beneath all that, though, is a thrum of something I can’t quite pinpoint. Like a pulse, still beating, but faint. An atrophied heart too weak to do little more than pump a small bit of life.
I kneel down to the floor and set my hand against the gritty surface, eyes closed. Focusing. On what, I’m not even sure, just that I feel a steady hum, like electricity. The unsettling sensation of knowing something was buried alive.
Memories, in my case.
Mindlessly running the key back and forth over its chain, I push to my feet and make my way through the main foyer and pass the parlor on the right. The library on the left. Neither of them like I remember, from the few snippets of memory that flicker and fade. I don’t bother with the once-grand staircase straight ahead of me. Not yet, anyway.
In spite of the heat outside, an uncanny chill lingers inside the house, tickling the sweat gathered across the back of my neck. Feels like something crawling across my skin.
A room beyond the staircase is one I remember as a family, or sitting, room, with an enormous fireplace along the back wall. Like the rest of the house, the floor is cluttered in dirt and debris, its sparse furniture so broken down and ramshackle, it’s a wonder any of it still stands.