The House Remains


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Dedicated to a memory of an old, almost forgotten, comfort-clique. Those individuals who helped me grow and discover the uniqueness of my forte.

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By

Devin M. Gaul


      It's the year 2032, Friday afternoon at approximately 5:34 p.m. A man wakes up to sirens dashing by an open window. The middle-aged man just lays there for a few moments, staring at the ceiling. Getting up rather quickly, he hurries for the bathroom holding his head. He leans over the toilet and pukes, grabs a hand towel and wipes his face. He sits there on the floor for a couple of minutes vacantly staring at the mucky water trying to collect his thoughts. Rising to his feet, he stares at himself through the mirror above the sink. His bleak, hazel eyes looked intently at the man on the other side of the mirror as if trying to find something that was lost and wilted with age. He turns the hot water on and splashes his face in an attempt to wake himself up a little more. Frowning, he grabs the same hand towel and removes the excess water from his chin. He then walks out of the bathroom.
      The man was a dirty-blonde haired, skinny, Caucasian who had a sickly look about him like a person who sustained serious internal injuries. His face was pale and bristly, his white t-shirt dirty, and his under-shorts were torn and stained from food. This appearance is from a man who hasn’t left his room in a couple of weeks; not to eat or answer the door. Opening the refrigerator door, he grabs a carton of milk and gulps down a few swigs, wipes his upper lip and flings it back into the fridge knocking over assortments of condiments. Noticing there's a message on his answering machine, he pushes the button knowing that he's only going to be hearing someone trying to comfort him:

"Hey Chris, it's me, Jay. I was just calling to check in on you.. (pause) You know, to see if you're alright and all. Look, I know it must be hard on you after hearing Ashley passed away. If you need anything, please, just call me. I'm here for you.. (pause) Alright, I love you, late."

      After listening to his brother's words, he frowns and pushes another button to delete the message when his phone rings. He rolls his eyes and shakes his head to the melancholy sound of its ringer. He doesn't answer the phone for the simple reason that he doesn't want to hear someone else trying to console him about what's happened. He felt he didn't need to hear anything else about Ashley's death. It was too much, the grief he felt gave him such a strain on his whole well-being to the point that he couldn't speak even if he wanted to. Wounded, that is the only way he could describe his emotions.

"Chris! Answer the fuckin' phone! I know you're home. (pause) Please, man? I just want to talk to you. I haven't heard anything from you since we last talked about.. (pause) ..well, at any rate, I just want to talk to you. I know you're hurtin'. If you're feeling.."

      Ignoring his brother's second message, he walks out of the room and back into his own to fall on his bed, only to stare at his ceiling once again. He tightly shuts his eyes trying to clear all thoughts so he doesn't have to be burdened with any more pain.

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      It was the coldest day on a fading winter and the mundane silence that lay over the street was broken only to a taxi-cab that pulls up to the curb. Christopher, or just plain Chris as he prefers to be called, steps out of the cab holding a small grayish box and five roses; two red, two white, and one black rose. He shuffles through his wallet and gathers enough currency and pays the cab driver, at which point the cab driver speeds off as if fleeing from a newly robbed bank.
      Chris turns and looks at an abandoned house, noticing the windows are boarded up and where the front door was before was now yellow caution tape waving freely spite what seemed like a non-existent breeze. As the cab driver peals off around a corner in the distance, he steps upon the sidewalk slowly. He looks down the old Locust street in both directions, peering at every little detail, breathing in the memories from a time long past. Smirking, he remembers that only a few feet ahead of him was where he and his friends use to play their daily game of hacky-sack to pass the time. He slowly takes his strides towards the rickety, old house and decides to make his way in through the back. Chris opens the wooden gate and doesn't pay any attention to the fence as it was falling to pieces on the ground.
      Walking on, he passes dead grass and a couple rusty, long-forgotten bikes his friends use to ride to work; when and if they ever were scheduled for work. Leaving the bikes behind him he makes his way past old patio furniture and sees a few teenagers sitting around a table, talking and laughing and handing amongst them a pipe packed with herb.

      "Dude, Jay, wasn't Lord of the Rings an awesome flick?" Alex asks as he hands Jay the pipe.

      "Yeah man," he says and pauses in mid-sentence as he takes a puff. "I can't wait 'til the next two movies come to our theater!" he hands the pipe over to Chris, "Wasn't that goblin battle towards the end the greatest?"

      "Probably the best battle scene I've ever had the pleasure to witness." Alex replied as he watches Chris grab the pipe to take his turn. Chris hits the pipe, coughs loudly and passes it on to Robert. "Hey Chris, let me ask you something."

      "Sure thing. What is it?" Chris responded, wondering why Alex has an evil looking grin on his face.

      "Why is it you always trip over yourself whenever Ashley’s around?" he says in a malicious tone of voice as if trying to poke fun at Chris.

      "Yeah!" Robert blurts out during his hit.

      "Shut up, guys!" Chris exclaims turning flush slightly.

      "Dude.." continues Alex, "We can totally tell you have the hots for her. You turn beet red every time you make eye contact with her. We all can see it. Right Rob?" he says and turns to Rob and grabs the pipe, hits it and passes it on still looking at Robert and continues his conversation as if Chris wasn't even there. "Remember when we were at the park up the street and we scored those 40s.."

      "Oh, that's right!" he replies, "Chris was hella flirting with her, well, trying to at least."

      They all laughed, except for Chris. He was blushing a shade of red that would put the devil to shame, or so he thought.

      In the middle of him reminiscing, he realized that he was starring into the house through the sliding glass door. Shaking off the memory like a bad cramp, he opens the door, slightly hesitates, and then steps through the threshold. Feeling a sense of acrid pain, he drops the roses and the box and falls to his knees. He looks forward, blankly at the vacant dinning room. He doesn't seem to see a run-down, dusty house that decayed over age, but a house that's life was full of great memories that were stripped away. Suddenly, he's struck with memories of his mother bellowing down the stairs at his younger siblings because they were lashing out on each other. He remembers his brother, Jay, making out with his first girlfriend over on the couch that once sat against the wall across the living room. He even recollects that upstairs, in his bedroom, was where he wrote his first piece of poetry.
      After awhile he got up, gathered the roses together and picked up the box and started on again. In every room he walks through he takes a deep breath, merely taking in the lost, forgotten memories that he has been trying to suppress for over 30 years. He walks to the edge of a staircase, looks up at the darkened hallway and cringes. He pulls out a lighter and ascends upward.
      When he reaches the top he feels a sudden chill. He shivers a bit and zips his jacket up a little more. Slowly making his way down the hall, he watches the lonely flame bounce of the wall where all his mother's picture frames once hung. Closing his eyes, he saw a picture of him and Ashley on their wedding day. He struggles with his thoughts again, after all, seeing Ashley in that wedding dress again only makes his pain worse.
      He stops at the end of the hall and cowers at the thought of going beyond the door that lay ahead. Behind this door he realizes that this is where Ashley and he spent many afternoons drinking and making out. In spite of everything, ditching school was one of their top priorities together. Oh—how he wishes he was still in high school with his sweetheart only having to worry about homework and his parents’ choirs.
      He opens the door in front of him softly and stumbles in, tripping on some ripped up carpet. He catches himself and walks to an old nightstand that was left behind and sets down the box and the roses. He walks to the window and opens the blinds to let the sun shine through. He takes his shirt and rubs all the dust and mildew off the window so the room lit up some more and then walks back to the center of the room and gets on his knees, pulling the roses toward him. He lines up the roses on the ground in front of him in such a way that both the red roses were on the left side and the white roses were on the right; he left the black rose upside down in the middle. Taking the box and setting it gently above the black rose, he opens it. He pulls out a piece of paper and a pencil and sits there for awhile, just writing. Eventually he finishes; it's a poem:

I remember you as though it were yesterday,
The essence of your smile lit up my everyday,
The sound of your voice made my heart sing,
Your eyes fixed on mine as we were meant to be,
Do you remember that day when we first met?
How we knew we'd be together and never forget?
Those were the days when I could hold you close,
But now is the time when I need you the most,
What went wrong? Why did you leave?
You took your own life and now I grieve,
—I'm taking mine, this way we can be together,
And spend our eternal love in the mists of forever.

      After finishing, he gently sets the poem under the black rose and grabs another sheet of paper. Quickly jotting down a few words about how he can't handle the pressure any longer and how he wishes all his fans would just move on and forget about him, he starts to cry. Considering that he was a well-known writer and traveled from place to place meeting new faces anywhere he went, he felt it was his obligation to say he was sorry and give what little remorse he could to the rest of the world. Tears begin to shower his legs as he removes a gun from the box and puts the cold steel between his teeth. He gives up one last smile and lets the .45 put him to sleep.
      Bang.
      All that remains are the memories within the house.



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©Devin Gaul