Chris Walden

Grandma's House

She stepped into the house for the first time since her grandmother had passed. She breathed in the familiar scent: mothballs with a hint of those peppermint LifeSavers her grandmother couldn’t be caught without. She had been in this house countless times over the years, but she realized she always took the same path: through the side door, across the kitchen, and into the living room where she sat on the couch and read the Ten Commandments out loud, while her grandmother sat nodding along in her chair. This house, built in the late 1800s, was full of relics she had never stopped to appreciate. Now, taking stock of the things around her, she was sure her grandmother would have had captivating stories to tell about why she had so many pig figurines, or who the people were in the painting done by her grandfather that hung in the dining room. She walked around room to room, surveying each one’s contents, and figuring out where to start clearing out first. She paused at the door to the basement, giving it a hard tug—the wood often swelled in the humidity and was difficult to open. Making her way down the steps, she remembered the story her dad used to tell her about the Boogey Man who lived in the crawl space down there. She was older now, and she knew there was no Boogey Man, which was why she laughed to herself when she felt a nostalgic twinge of fear as she passed the crawlspace door. She waved her arm in the air, searching for the string that would illuminate the one dim bulb that hung in the center of the room. She wasn’t afraid of the dark, but she also didn’t like being in the 200-year-old basement of her dead grandmother without any light. Finally, her fingers closed around the frayed end. She let out a shriek as the dusty bulb flickered on and shed light on a skeleton propped up on the old workbench next to her. She bent over with her hands on her knees and let her heavy breathing morph into a laugh as she recalled the haunted house they had set up down there for the neighborhood the previous year. She made a mental note to make sure she got rid of it—the realtor probably wouldn’t find it as funny.