Week 9

March 16th 3:02 pm

I am going out through the basement door and am greeted by cobwebs, now on my knuckles, stuck to my knuckle hairs.

I am outside now, walk on the dried leaves, finger in my pocket the key ring holding the one key I now have to the new car in the driveway. I am lucky, but mostly I feel sickly in the pit of my stomach, at the back of my throat.

I have much to do in the next couple of days, and I have gone through much in the past week, and nature is, unfortunately, the last thing on my mind right now.

I walk behind the houses and notice weird droppings that look rather rodent like (an observation based on cleaning up after my own rats. But these are not jelly-bean-shaped; one end is not completely rounded. I feel gross needing to observe these dried-up pieces, all neatly dropped on a dried leaf.

I hear a bird flitting through the bushes, back and forth, before I see her again and mistake him for a robin. She is brown, not red. I wish for spring as my fingers ache with cold.

I hear Mark calling for him, but I don’t see him. I hear a thud and leaves rustle, and he is there in front of him; he claims he dropped from the kitchen window, doing the opposite of what he did days ago, climbing in through the kitchen window to see if he could do it.

“Were you scared?” he asks me when I had found him in the kitchen. “I could have been a burglar.”

“No,” I say. “I knew it was you.”

I know he did not drop from the window; he came in from the front door and jumped over the wall.

Mark is ahead of me now as I walk to the back of the abandoned house. Suddenly a bird chirps a peculiar call (three rising notes four times) as Mark gets closer. He is probably getting close to the bird’s nest. Mark mimics her; she doesn’t relent.

I walk to the large blocks of thick-width cement that make a pathway further down. They are sturdy, surprisingly. Perhaps a week ago, when the weather was at sixty degrees, it would be a different story with loose, wetted soil.

I come close to this low-level tree, its trunk curved back to the ground as if holding some heavy weight. Mark says he wants to look at this tree, which I notice is covered by something similar to the winter creeper, but seems to grow out from its vines.

I notice further down a neighbor has a pile of wood, topped with a dull-colored Christmas tree; it’s underneath that worries me, as I see a black hole, where anything might live.

I am worried as Mark is not careful as he stomps around in his moccasins, breaking twigs and rustling leaves.

I notice soil underneath the debris of twigs and dead October leaves that are still green, just torn off by the wind from a storm. I pull more debris back; there are no bugs, just dirt. I am intrigued by how thin the layers of leaves are.

Days ago, a neighbor raked off the leaves from the lawn of the abandoned house, leaving clumps of grass underneath exposed. Within the next day, as the temperature dropped again, the soil hardened and the grass lost color.

“Here’s a scary thought for you,” Mark says from above me. “The window on the other side of this house is open. The window is cracked; you can fit your fingers underneath, maybe open the window.”

I am unsure of how to react to this.

“Do you think there are squatters in there?” he asks. “We should find out how much that home is.”

Mark picks up the brick near his feet. “Oh look,” he says. “A brick from Bridgeville.”

Before he drops it, I look at the writing on the side of it.

“C.P. Mayer / Brick Co / Bridgeville, PA”

I think about this, about tracing the history of this brick, but I am overwhelmed at this moment, at how we then walk up to look further at the house, how the door to its basement is gray-blue, peeling, and the doorknob is rusted over; how the electric wires in the cable box are plugged out; how it looks like there was a doorbell there, once.

“You’d think they had heaters in the basement to utilize heat,” Marks says. “And it looks like it has a better foundation than the place we’re in.”

I tell him I don’t know. I don’t know.