Photograph entitled Haunted © by John D. Stanton 2006 www.3AMBlue.com
REUNION
by Michael Hanson © 2006
I had come full circle.
What amazed me the most were my own flabbergasted expectations. There it stood. The house I had grown up in.
And here I was experiencing the antithesis of contemporary cliché. The terrifying overwhelming structure
that had been my entire world for 18 years had not shrunk one bit in the intervening years. Even through my
experienced adult eyes, the eyes of a cynical divorced man, this monstrosity still seemed gargantuan in
proportion and intimidating in dimension. And by some strange trick of the dusk light, siding, paint, trim,
and shingles all appeared relatively new and unweathered, as they had the day I was born and brought inside
to begin my life 44 years ago (or so my mother had always told me).
The antique skeleton key given to me by the family lawyer this morning slid effortlessly into the large
brass peep-hole. Well oiled hinges betrayed only the faintest of creaks as I trod across polished oak floor
boards into the front waiting room. Looking about myself, I could not help but wonder about the ghost of
things...the shape of the past. Yes, with the exception of now antique throw rugs, oak furniture, and
ancient portraits the place had been emptied out. But for some reason, it didn't feel empty.
Studying the chipping paint, as I walked from living room, to library, to knitting room, I came to realize
how much of my own past I had simply forgotten over the years. Endless days of detail had somehow been lost
in my escape to a new life these past couple of decades. What had I been like? What were my dreams and wants
and desires back then? Nothing came to mind. And then that last argument with my ex-wife four years ago
suddenly struck me, and her final accusatory words took on new meaning, "I can't take it anymore Mark. You
never tell me anything about yourself! You never open up." Jerene yelled, in final frustration. "It's like
you didn't even exist before we met."
Passing through the side and back porch, my chest feeling unusually heavy and overworked, I paused
hesitantly at the base of the main staircase before reluctantly climbing it.
The funeral had been simple and brief. Both caskets were quickly and efficiently lowered into the
dual-grave. It was a rather barren affair, as both of my parents were the product of single-child families,
and I was the sole survivor of their original four offspring, the youngest, the towheaded blue-eyed baby
boy.
And so I walked from bedroom to bedroom, main bath, closet toilets, cloak room, initially experiencing only
the briefest flickers of past images, unable to unearth the wealth of detail that surely must lay within the
treasury of common memory.
Standing in the shell of my brother Conrad's bedroom, the first of my siblings to die before reaching
adulthood, I felt drops of sweat form on my brow. I had been kept secluded when Conrad passed. Some long
term ailment I had been told. So soon I had forgotten him, in time his name becoming no more than something
out of myth and unfeeling history. Brown hair and brown eyes. Athletic. Ingenious. Bold. My elder brother.
How could I ever have forgotten you?
Next I stood in the doorway of my sisters' room. Harriet and Cianna. Red-haired green-eyed freckled twins.
One an artist, the other a musician. Two joyous halves of a jubilant whole. One gone at fifteen. The other
sixteen. Again, as I was but an adolescent, I was kept busy with housework and unanswered questions, not
allowed at either funeral or burial, leaving behind their existence, like favored books stored and unread
for many years, gathering dust.
I headed back down the stairs, the emptiness, the gap, so unacknowledged, so ignored over 26 years, growing
inside me, hollowing me out. I tripped on the last few steps and fell forward, bruisingly, onto the hard
floor.
Years ago, when I had fled this oppresive domocile, upon my high school graduation, the rumors and whispers
from relatives spilled upon me like rain on a granite headstone. Unfelt. Unheard. Unnoticed.
Yet now, an eternity later, their distant words explode in my mind with a clarity and power that makes me
swoon as I sit up. Unexplained death. Unknown causes. Mysterious ailments. Strange secluded family.
Secrets...
Blood trickles from my scalp down onto my right cheek as I struggle to stand despite my sprained left foot.
The front door remains open. Beseeching. Undefined panic fills me and I limp toward freedom, gasping with
every breath.
And then the sheer multitude and cacophony of experience, an irrepressible tidal wave of repressed memory,
floods into the forefront of my consciousness.
The endless nights crying myself to sleep, pillows pressed tightly against my ears, forbidding the distant
screams of terror and pain from intruding. The horror that for some unknown arcane reason laid just outside
my bedroom door but which never ever entered. And every morning, my cold distant parents ignoring my fevered
eyes and silent inquiries...and I too frightened to speak out.
And thus I reach the entrance and collapse in tears upon the front stoop. But it is too late. It has always
been too late...because I now realize I have lived the thinnest of lies all these years. The frailest of
deceptions. Oily dark tendrils of comforting madness exude from every window and wall, enshackling me.
Binding me. Dragging me back within.
I am still a prisoner of this house...as I always was...as I always will be...
- THE END -
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