Once Past

She didn't know why he allowed himself to be drawn back to this old place. He couldn't explain it himself, so every year they would return to the rotting floors and torn shutters of his childhood.

"This was my room....that was my brother's room..."

The rooms were squalid, ready to be torn down; soon another family would call this land home, the stifling perimeters of the chain-link fence cozy and free of limits.

"We used to eat here."

It seemed as though the screaming had bonded with the brown wallpaper and its tobacco brown ceilings, staining them with the frantic anger of two generations.

"They left the TV set...doesn't work anymore."

The gates had rusted shut behind him sometime after his seventeenth year, after high school, when he moved into his dorm and refused to come home to his parent's arguments. His mother had dissipated into meth and acid, his father had started a new family, and the land had rotated to the hands of Habitat for Humanity.

A lock turned, the door opened. "Mister Kidman? We're bringing the bulldozer through in an hour."

She rested her hand against his shoulder. "Dinner's waiting at the hotel."

He squeezed his eyes shut, rubbed the bridge of his nose, and leaned against her. "I'm ready."

He didn't look over his shoulder when the wrecking ball crushed his bedroom window.


The End