My grandma on my dad’s side passed away when I was around sixteen. She lived in Houston so I didn’t see her very much or know her very well. In fact, I’ve only visited her twice in my life, and she visited us in Seattle once.
The first time I visited, it was during the summer and I was six. In my memory, Texas was a very exotic and adventurous place. It was my first time on the plane! I remember going to the beach and finding dead, iridescent jellyfish littered in the sand. Wild peacocks roaming about (am I crazy? does Texas have wild peacocks? I remember seeing peacocks.)… A spontaneous lightning storm… Banana trees… A tortoise in the backyard…
The second time I visited, I was a sophomore in high school during the late fall. It was a completely different experience. Overcast skies, broken lawn chairs, boarded windows and foreclosed properties… The neighborhood was eerily empty and each house looked home to a crime scene. My grandma’s was no different. The bulbs were dim, the carpets were stained, there was laundry hanging everywhere, and hoards of junk scattered about… Plus the place reeked of weed because of an orphaned delinquent cousin I have who lived with my grandma.
So this man who apparently was my uncle (apparently) was also at the house to greet us. After a while, he mentioned that my cousin was crazy and needed to see a shrink because of the disturbing, but farfetched claims he made about the house. He would see people running through the house, through the walls and out to the yard when no one else did. And a couple of times, he shouted for everyone to rush to the living room to see the woman that was on the ceiling.
Whether or not those claims were true, the house had a negative vibe. Anyway, before we left that night, my sister and I decided to tour around the house to re-visit old memories. When we got to a bedroom, we both remembered it was the room in which we slept during our first visit. She went up to the window and started to get really freaked out about something.
She told me that when we first visited, she woke up to a knocking at the window in the middle of the night. A little boy was peering through, watching us. She ignored him and went back to sleep.
She only realized during our second visit that the house was built on a slope, and the room we slept in was on the second floor of the house.
