Entry One

Through the blinding light there was just the photograph from the coffee table.

“Man, you live in a cave out here.” David said as he walked away from the light switch by the front door.  “I’m gonna put this beer in the fridge, if that’s alright with you.”

“S**t, man, I’d rather it be cold.”  I opened a drawer of the mahogany end table next to the couch and slid the photograph inside.  I drink to forget that sort of thing I reminded myself.

I stood and looked around the sprawling house.  It had been something my father had left me when he passed.  Still, I think it has more rooms that I know what to do with.  

My mother had the taste to fill it with antique furniture of reds and dark browns before the divorce and most of the furniture had stayed.  To look around the house you would think I was rich.  Even though my mother lived here with me she rarely left her room, which in this overdone, over remodeled house, was every bit as accommodating as the entire living room of the trailer she had been staying in previously.  She had succumbed to Multiple Sclerosis as she had entered her sixties and a house, one that she lived alone in, had become too much for her.  After getting the house in the will, the house which had expanded to double its size and grandiosity since the divorce, I asked her to join me there in the midst of talks about putting her in a senior home.  She understood that it was my house, and allowed me free reign in it.  Of course, the interconnected rooms she stayed in were enough so that she could live self contained in an area the size of an apartment.

The first assumption people have walking into this house is that I am rich.  For a man of twenty years to own such a place would suggest that but my father had poured nearly every cent he had ever owned into building it, hoping to leave me something grand when he passed.  His pension paid the bills and allowed me a certain level of comfortable poverty while I pursued a career as a writer.  I wasn’t too much of one yet, though, I had only finished one book and the royalties were going directly into fixing an issue I had with the house, the basement.

Like I said before, my father had poured every cent he had earned into this house, expanding it and so forth.  So it was no surprise to anyone that he left a few things undone when he passed, the largest of which being a basement.  Originally, he had obsessively dug into the house to strengthen the foundation, but then he imagined expanding the height of the crawlspace until he would be able to walk through it easily.  It had always been a pet peeve to have to crawl through possible snakes and spiders to get at the guts of a house.  In the end, he dug a little too far and decided to create a bomb shelter floor below his expanded crawl space.  In essence, he created, or at least planned to create two floors of basement in addition to the two floors above ground.  The first was a maintenance level and the last was to be a secret basement workshop.  

When he died it was a sketchily dug out cavern with a few temporary lights, a few concrete slabs, a rope ladder, and expose pipes and no one could get to if they were ever to need fixing.  After paying crews to slowly build that up from almost nothing, there wasn’t much left in the bank for me to just spend as I wanted.  

So, I am always thankful when David came over with a few drinks to ease my pain.   Walking down the drawn out hallway that leads to the kitchen, I stop so smell a bowl of potpourri on a hallway vanity.  These bowls of potpourri pop of up all around the house in random places as simple evidence that Mom’s been around.

Dead flowers, soaking in the water, still have something left to give; a scent that is the last remaining essence of their being.  Withering flowers are still beautiful as age and death stretches across their petals.  A delicate lace of what was.

Turning the corner into the kitchen, I realize that David isn’t there.  No reason not to start without him, after all he could have easily gotten lost on the way to the bathroom.  I grab a beer from the fridge and crack it open.  Taking a deep chug I say to myself, “here’s to forgetting, here’s to oblivion.”   But seriously, where is David?  I’ll probably finish this beer before he gets himself unlost.  

“Dude, where’d you go?”  I call out to him.  No answer.  Noticing the hatch leading to the simple rope ladder into the basement is open, I call down the shaft.  “David.  You in there?”

“Yeah.” He answers before an awkward pause.  “So, uh, how long are you going to keep her down here?”

So, he knew my secret.  I stared long into the darkness wondering what I would do.