something went wrong

Growing up there was this dirt road a few blocks from my house. It went about a half a mile into the woods and led to a big farm house. The first time I saw it, it was already burned out. Whisps of soot jutted out from the shattered remains of the windows and clung to the outside walls. Entire sections of the exterior were missing. The door was off of its hinges, lying in splinters on the floor. Baseball sized dents littered the outer-side of it. Some of them were still stained red from the blood.


I don't know who it was that lived there back when the house was inhabitable. I know it was a family, that they had a kid. There was a child's bedroom. An infant; the crib was left behind, tipped over and broken. The few bits of the wall that were there and weren't charred black had the remnants of the nursery wallpaper. Drawers were flung open, tiny clothes strewn about. The toybox was half-emptied.

The pictures are something that stuck in my mind. The bedroom floor was littered with them. Some in tact, most of them at least partially burned. The biggest pile was next to the bed. Next to the bottle. There were some that were torn in half. Polaroids that were crumpled. You can't tear Polaroids. Not by hand. The pictures were the thing I went back to most when I went to the house. Everything seemed frantic; the child's clothes, the rotted and charred food lying on the floor in front of the refridgerator, the luggage with half of it missing, but the pictures... the pictures looked unhurried.

The first time I went there, nothing sunk in. "What a cool burned out house" thought a young, immature version of me. Every time I went back, though, the details began to stand out. I kept going back, and for a while I never told anybody where I was going. I was just another kid running around the neighborhood, off on summer vacation or spring break. I don't know why I never told anybody, why I thought I had to keep it a secret. But I did. It was a secret. And it was mine. It wasn't until I was older, and by absences were more conspicuous, that I told them about the house. And that was when I asked what exactly happened.

The question got cautious glances between my parents. They didn't say. But by then they didn't have to. The "who"s and "why"s were irrelevant to me. The house told me more than enough. Everything about the house said it was build by hand. The framed pictures, the child's bedroom, the bedroom with the bed big enough for two, but not big enough for them to be very far apart, the patch out back that must have been a garden, and a hundred other details said that it was an idyllic home. And the clothes and toys and things strewn from the front door to the gravel driveway like branches after a storm said that something went wrong.

I only went to the house once more after I talked to my parents about the house. I spent the better part of the day there, but as I walked toward the door I didn't feel anything compelling me to stay, or to come back. As I walked out the door and carefully descended the porch stairs, now completely falling apart, I noticed something that hadn't yet caught my eye. One of the child's shoes was there on the ground in front of the bottom step. I crouched down, reaching out to touch it, but I didn't. I just walked away. A few years ago I heard they were going to tear it down.