From the Fumes

This story is © copyrighted to Adrienne Wolter in 2004 and onwards. It was written on Friday, April 4th, 2004. Do not take this story. It is autobiographical, for the most part. The only really true thought in this is that I do draw hearts on my border, heh.

From the Fumes

As a child, every year at some point I would draw a little heart on the border outside my bedroom door, writing the date next to it.
I don’t know. It just became a tradition, when I remembered it. I had six or seven of them, the earliest from 1995, when my mother told me to wash them away.
They’re memories. Not exactly of how well I could draw a heart that particular year, but connections to reality in the fact that I have been able to keep one ‘tradition’ going when I couldn’t any others. They’ve been washed away, scribbled on by my brother, worn against, but they still show, a bit faded, with their dates next to them.
That wasn’t the reason I returned here after some number of years, but in my pained silence I noted it. I noted everything. Everything was almost perfectly the same as I remembered it from eight years before, or else predictably arranged.
What had happened? It was just like my parents disappeared.
Maybe they had.
I looked out the window. Rain. I couldn’t hear it, but then again, I couldn’t hear anything. The house, thick as it was with dust, was dead to me. My parents had been taken somewhere to prepare for a funeral just an hour or two ago. The police had told me that they’d been lying dead for days before anyone found them.
I remembered the scene as vividly as it had been when I’d entered. Since then, my tears had dried, but everything whirling around me was so unreal I found it hard to believe. I wasn’t exactly sure what was making me so dizzy, the horridness of it all or the fumes that were still detectable in the air.
They said there had been some fumes from the basement. They came upstairs and twirled around my parents and their animals like a deadly noose.
I could detect it. How could they have not? How could a house full of animals and two humans be all slaughtered by these, without even realizing it?
When I got the door open, which was made extremely hard by the dead dog which had been lying in front of it, I’d been faced with my definition of horror. Lightning, my dog. We’d still called him a puppy even though he was almost as old as me. It was a wonder that he’d lived to be twenty-two before dying. But creatures lived when my mother was around. She just had a way with them.
A cat had slumped on the carpet in the room next to the entrance, snow white fur and pink ears visible behind a basket lying upside-down on the floor. In the kitchen, on the floor and on newspaper, was the carcass of an Amazon parrot, the one I’d grown up with and knew would probably outlive me.
He hadn’t.
So I’d continued my tour of the dead house. I was too sad to curse the old basement and its dangerous gases. I was too lonely to worry about how my brother was taking this. He’d surely been told about it by now.
And that was how I came to stand in front of the border outside my bedroom door. New tears streaming down my cheeks in waves like the rain cascading down the window, I picked up a pencil that was lying exactly where I’d left it eight years ago and drew one more heart, one last date.
After all, I’m not coming back to this house.
It’s dead.