Sam's Story

The campfire made weird shadows on her face, making her almost look ghoulish. She was beautiful though, at least I thought so. She was a bit chunky but whatever. She was crazy, but fun crazy, not dangerous crazy. Not usually. Usually Sam was a blast to be around. But she did have a different side. Sometimes she'd just get sad and sit and walk off to be herself and then come back awhile later and be normal again, with no explanation at all. It made her more desirable to me, I wanted to get to know more about her, wanted to know everything. I could never have her, and it hurt, like knives cutting into my heart. I still love her, this mysterious thing that wandered in and out of my life in the course of a year. Of course I'd see her on TV later, but that's another story...
She shifted her guitar on her lap but didn't set it aside. It looked so natural sitting there, it would have felt wrong if she got rid of it. She gazed a long time into the fire before she started, almost like she was drawing up something she'd hidden away a long time ago...

My mother was a piece of shit. I'm not saying that to be mean, she really was. She was an awful parent and, as I came to realize much later, a truly awful person. When you're really little you think that the small world that surrounds you is the same for everyone because you have no frame of reference. You think "Okay, all the other kids get their arms burnt with cigarettes too, so It's not so bad" Or "All the other kids never have enough food to eat too, it's not just me." But then you go to school and you find out that you've been getting the short end of the stick all along and it hurts. It hurts and it makes you angry. Of course you don't say anything because you'll just get beaten more. So you take your anger and your hurt and you bury it deep down inside where no one else can see it. You bury it and it seethes and boils and it eats away at your soul. People who don't come from broken homes have no idea, they look at you like you're a cockroach that needs to be stepped on. And if they don't, then they pity you, which is worse sometimes. They see your shitty clothes and the scars on your arms and they patronize you because they think you're stupid. And then that anger comes up again, anger you can't do anything with, anger that kills you inside. And they wonder why people get so messed up sometimes. When you're a kid all you can do is suck it and hide it and then when you get older it all comes out and we do terrible things, things that shock the people reading their morning newspapers. They shake their heads and move on, only a glancing thought for scum like us. It's very hard to rise above that fate.
You turned out alright.
Yeah, It's all chance and fate too. But anyways. Yeah, my mom was shit, my dad ran off, and my sister...well thats something I don't like to talk about. All I had was myself. My mom had a job for awhile, at Alpaca foundry, and I guess she felt some obligation as a parent at that point because she would never leave me by myself at home. What she'd do though, was drop me off at a realatives house, usually without telling them. And I would spend the day there, wether they were home or not. It was usually at my Great Aunt Gina's, who had a day job too and was never home and I'd wander around in the woods till she picked me up. God, sometimes I wonder how the Hell I survived. I was only seven for christsakes.
But anyways, my aunt lived in this huge old house. I remember it really well, it had this shitty brown shingle siding on it, that always scared me for some reason. Inside it was really kind of boring. Aunt Gina didn't have any kids so she didn't have any toys or games and the only books she had were Reader's Digest Condensed Books which people pretty much just put up on shelves to make it look like they read a lot, I think. When she was home, and I couldn't wander outside, she'd make me sit and watch Soap Operas with her which was torture for me but it's weird because whenever I hear the opening to The Young and the Restless, it brings back this wave of nostalgia that's so strong it sickens me. It's not a bad tune, I just hate it because it brings me back to my shitty childhood. (She laughed a little bit here, and paused before going on.)
When my aunt was home, I was never allowed past the living room. I always wanted to explore the house, it was so big. Well, to me it was. Everything looks big when you're little. For a long time, all I saw was the dusty living room with it's faded green couch and old broken TV. And 1970s yellow carpet. Uck. (She scrunched up her face, which I always thought was cute).
But one time mom dropped me off when no one was home, and Aunt Gina had forgotten to lock the front door. It was kind of a big thing to me, to be able to see the rest of the house, but it turned out to be pretty boring mostly. My Aunt was pretty poor and was all her life. I found out much later that she had actually been born and raised in that house, she died in it too. Kind of sad if you ask me. Anyways...sorry I keep getting off track.
It's alright...
(She sighed) There was pretty much nothing upstairs. My aunt slept in a room off the living room, I think. I remember how the floor was all dusty and I left my footprints in it. I thought this was really weird and kind of cool. I wrote my name with my fingers in it and made hand prints. The upstairs was basically a hallway with two door on either side. Their was nothing in the first one, a skeletal frame of a bed, I think. There was a bunch of hangers in the closet which kind of freaked me out. I don't know why. Weird things scare you when you're a kid.
The next room down was locked but when I looked through the keyhole, I could see another bed frame, but this one had a mattress on it. There was something just beyond what I could see, something hanging from the ceiling. It must have been moving slightly, because it would go in and out of sight. It was something pale, possibly white, but that's all I could make out. After trying to figure out what it was for a long time, I realized I could hear the creak of whatever was holding it up as it moved. This wouldn't scare me until I thought about it years later.
The room across the hallway was open and this was the weirdest thing because the windows were all boarded up and it was dark inside. When I hit the lightswitch I could see that the wallpaper was all torn up, very badly. Whatever had done it had left huge gashes in the plaster as well, gashes that looked like claw marks. And it smelled, it smelled so bad. It was like wet dog mixed with old dirt and rot. I closed the door and ran downstairs. I never opened that last door.
And that was it?
Pretty much. I know, an awful story right? Well I did think about exploring the basement but I took one look down the dark stairs and there was no fucking way I was going down there. Andrea, it's your turn. Tell us a story...
Wait, when your aunt died, didn't anyone go through the house?
No, there was a fire and the place burnt to the ground, with Great Aunt Gina in it. Anyways, my story sucked. Andrea, your turn...