The walls were painted like 1979 died and no one had bothered to tell the inhabitants. The carpet looked like steel wool and felt about as cozy.
#Grau grub theme cracked#
We sat in the middle of our empty basement and cracked rainbow candy canes between our jaws to find out their flavors. We ate pizzas left by the friends who helped us paint the walls. My sister and I ate McDonalds breakfast sandwiches, hot in waxed paper.
#Grau grub theme full#
My mother went to the grocery store, now so close we could walk to it, and bought frozen pot pies with billowy yellow skin, full of butter and flake, that spilled gravy-robed-guts with the prick of a fork. All of our utensils, plates and pans were packed away for what seemed like weeks. Decades later, I still remember a few of the interiors. Here, a bedroom, a basement, a backyard-like an incantation. This could be my backdrop! Here, the corner where I could read, here the closet where I could hide. When my parents started looking for a house, I didn’t mind the Saturdays and Sundays spent walking through echoing rooms, the backdrops of imaginary people’s lives. Houses had dark bedrooms and no one upstairs but my own two parents or my kid sister. But like a lot of kids who grow up sandwiched between floors, I dreamt of a house. I sometimes fell asleep to the strains of college parties, and sometimes I was pulled upstairs by my nightgown sleeve, as my mother pointed at me and said “My kid needs to sleep.” I found mouse droppings on my nightstand and months later, after we got the cat, a freshly slain mouse laid to rest beside my slippers. I picked wild apples full of worms and sat on swings until they squeezed my thigh meat. I scraped knees with kids upstairs and slept in the electric glow of a streetlight right outside my bedroom window. A testament to its power, the house was not a vessel for ghosts but the ghost itself. Ever since my parents’ marriage ended, I was haunted by that house. Over the holidays I flew to Maryland to empty my childhood home.
0 kommentar(er)
