The Old House

This is one of my attempts at serious writing. I apologize in advance. Please feel free to verbal kick me in the balls next time you see me:

The door swung open with the creakiness that comes with age, waking dust settled on the floor long ago and turning it into clouds filtering the light that gently wafted through the bare windows. Ryan stood in the doorway of the tiny cape cod unable to traverse the threshold he had past through so many times. The memories came flooding back, though patchy and incomplete. The nights alone and huddled in his room while his mother pulled the night shift at the local diner. The bitter winter days without a working heater when his mother would take him into the blanket she had draped across her shoulders like a female hen sheltering her chick and read him stories until he fell asleep. The nights he had snuck through the back door after a night of a raucous drinking with his high school buddies while his mother slept, exhausted, upstairs.

A wave of resolve stirred him and the feet that once felt nailed to the timbers of the front porch he stood on broke free of their bonds. The ancient hardwood floor yawed and groaned under the weight of each step, begging for release from the pressure they had once yearned for in their younger days. Footprints trailed his pace, echoing his steps like the ghosts that had haunted him ever since that day. He wished that they weren’t there, that no one would know, that he could be alone. One day he would join his ghosts, but who would he haunt.

An old cobweb blocked the stairs to the second floor, and Ryan brushed them away like a man trying to find his way through a heavy fog. Nothing could survive in this house, not even a spider. He ascended the stairs where he sat the time the police came to the house, unable to quench the tears that streamed like glisten rain drops down his tiny cheeks and convulsions that turned his insides on end. He grabbed the worn handrail to brace himself against the overbearing dank atmosphere that hung thick in the hallway. Shuffling across the floor like he did as a child, he approached a door, formerly a castle gate, and pushed it open without ceremony. The door could no longer shield him from the troubles of the world. Exposed and defenseless on the plane, he was an open target for the scum of the world.

The room was just as he’d left it, though it seemed smaller now, as if it shrunk with time. The bed frame, covered in a thin layer of dust that replaced the sheets, was nestled into the far corner framed by a single window, with the dresser opposing it on the other wall next to closet. There were still a few hangers left on the closet bar, a moment frozen in time like a picture. Without hesitation, Ryan moved to the closet, the motivation of a child on Christmas morning propelling him into frenzy, and searched the floorboards until he found one that was loose. Slowly, he pulled a small unassuming box from the hole left in the wall and sat on the floor, his pants covered in dust, cradling it like he had done in what seemed like another life. For a split second he was five again – no sense of fear, loss, loneliness or abandonment, only the pure joy of an innocence that can only be felt by children. Little by little, he carefully opened the box and unfolded its contents. The photograph he clasped in one hand was color faded but discernible. Staring back at him were the faces of a young man and a boy wearing a baseball cap. Tears welled in his eyes as a piece of his memory slipped softly into place. He could see his father again.