until I finally plopped onto my bed and waited for what? I don't know but that night seemed alive with tabs and scratches and everything would make me mute the TV and wait again I was tired the next day at work but everything seemed to be back to normal by the next week It was a Monday when my supervisor walked up to me in the break room and asked what I thought about having the winter dinner at my property, and I lied. I told him I was going to have extended family over, and that they would be staying for a couple of weeks. Easily, the lie came out, and he believed it. He said not to worry about it, that they were going to bite the bullet and pay for a real venue instead of the park space, like they had planned. Too many complainers, he said. i chuckled and nodded for the rest of the conversation until he left but really the truth was that i had been planning to agree to the event taking place there i had bought trash bags and i found the brooms out from in the shed i started cleaning the porch then the living room but i kept stopping myself there was something about that house that made me think twice. So I was about to head upstairs that Saturday, room in hand, but just as I passed the third step, I felt it. A sudden drop in temperature, the ambient of the house just a little bit darker, like there was something out there, waiting. I turned around right away and went back to my room. I thought of my parents and their time there, rooms I hadn't been stepped in for years before they even passed away, thinking that perhaps it wasn't that they couldn't go upstairs anymore, but rather that they didn't want to. Sometimes I would lay there in bed at night, thinking about the place, and I would hear a swing creak, that deep, lonely groan that would come from the outside, steps that would travel from one side of the house to the other, sometimes fading into nothingness right above me. Strangely familiar, but I didn't think much further than that. So I gave up on the idea of the appraiser and started getting annoyed at my brother's calls to sell. I told him we would both take care of it if that's what he wanted so badly, and that I'd be waiting for him to come and help clean out the place. he hasn't called my home would be only the room and my kitchen and the idea of a door that would lead me straight to it I could live like that forever it's what I'm hoping for anyway I still avoid the rest of the house