Story-A-Day #374: Dream House

DREAM HOUSE

I have a dream house, but mine is not like yours.  Most people have dream houses, idealized visions of where they would choose to spend their days.  Maybe yours is an open concept living space; maybe it has stainless steel appliances in the kitchen; maybe there is a library with sliding ladders to access the dusty tomes on your upper shelves.

My dream house is not like that.  My dream house is not even close to that.  It is an ominous, decrepit shell that is caving in upon itself.  It is not the dream house I would have selected given the choice, but it is the one that comes to me in my dreams and haunts my waking hours.

Entire walls are missing from this house.  Nature has started to reclaim it, to finish destroying this evil place.  Eventually nature will reclaim this house and erase it from memory, but for now it still lingers, a place where unspeakable things once occurred.  Nature is a natural cleanser, but there is only so much that nature can accomplish without assistance.  What nature achieves can only happen over time, excrutiatingly long stretches of minutes, months, and millenia.

I know this house inside out.  I know the lay out of the kitchen, the corridor that leads to the bedroom, the small living room with its peeeling floral wallpaper.  I know the mud floored basement, etched with the footprints of occupants long forgotten.

This is not a happy place.  It is home to tragedy and misfortune.  You can see the remnants in the blood stained fabric of the work bedroom carpet.  You can see it in the festered remains of meals long abandoned on a cold November morning.  You can see it in the neglect that has since befallen this place.

This is my dream house and it is a place of perpetual nightmares.  If you stand still at night, you can still hear the whimpering ghost voices calling out for help; for release from their torment.  This is not a happy place, nor a friendly one.  This is not a place where one would choose to spend time, but it is one that I can not seem to escape.  It is as much a part of me as I am a part of it.