The Abandoned House

Today’s post is based on a writing prompt I shared in a previous Daily Drafts & Dialogues post. Keep reading to see what I wrote, and to access more writing prompts.

What I wrote below is based on the following writing prompt: Write a scene in which there is an abandoned house. 

---

He could see the decaying winding staircase through the jagged holes punched out of the stained-glass window on the front door, which he noticed was slightly ajar as he waded through the towering weeds of the overgrown lawn. A lawn he used to mow every Saturday for free. A lawn that was more like a wild, small, lost suburban jungle now. It used to be much bigger. Right?

How was this the same house in which he had been raised, if that's what you want to call it? Was this really the house where he had learned how to tie his shoelaces and play the piano and complete long division, all with the utmost precision? Where he had learned what it meant to hide and cry and fight, sometimes all at once, albeit quietly. So, the neighbors would never know. They could never know. That was the loudest unspoken rule behind those walls that were now falling down in stages, in pieces and broken bits all around him. Finally. No one could ever know. Although he always would.

And more importantly, he wondered: how is this version of the house, the version before me, the empty and dilapidated version, somehow more authentic to my memories? More authentic to the experiences I had within. Of self-imposed solitude and pensive busyness and anxious thoughts that were morphed into completed chores and neat rows of clothing and boxes and jars or anything else that fit in or on immaculately neat shelving and drawers and closets that were always dusted, sprayed, and closed. Without the coveted permission to share or consume or use anything. Not even the air to breathe, it seemed. 

Seeing his childhood house, never a home, up close again started bringing back flashes of fire and pain— palpable physical, mental, and emotional anguish— that he thought had dissipated and faded. But now, as he opened the front door and walked over shards of glass and splintered boards, it all came rushing back, like a lit match. Now aflame, the light that never was there, engulfed his being, dominated his superimposed imaginings like the screens on the back porch. 

Full of reckoning, he knew what he had to do next, to make the pain and imaginings go away. For good. Forever. To be free. At last. He rushed through the kitchen, nearly tripping over the crumbling island debris, through the back door that hung on by a single hinge, down the crooked creaky back steps with cracking paint, to the shed, where it all began. 

…

[Write what happens next and share what you come up with in a comment or subscriber chat thread below.]

---

© All Rights Reserved by K.E. Creighton and Creighton’s Compositions LLC. The above work is a piece of fiction. While, as in all fiction, the literary perceptions and insights are based on experience, all names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

---

Today’s Writing Prompt