Fiction Friday – The Last House on the Left – If Walls Could Talk

Warning.  The content of this week’s Fiction Friday is disturbing.  

They called me the Last House on the Left, after some movie that scared the bejeebers out of every kid in town. I was only the last house on the left if you were coming from the east going west, coming the other way another house would claim my status and I became the first house on the right.

I wonder if the people who gave me this name ever considered that every or almost every street in town boasted or could boast of having two, not one, two last houses on the left. Oh, well. Given that there are so many last houses on the left the odds were really tipped in our favor that some bad thing would be happening in one or many of us.

I am not sure what the movie was about.

Why don’t we have a movie called the house on the corner? Then what, there would be twice as many of us and we’d be counted twice being a corner house we could belong to two streets if you don’t consult with the mail carrier.

I really don’t mean to bore you with details and the math but I’ve been here a long time and I’ve thought about it for just as long.

The story I have to tell is creepy. Bad. It isn’t too late to leave the room. Come back next Friday and don’t witness the rest of this.

I really don’t remember when I came to be. Some houses know from the day of wiring, when the lights come on for the first time that they are houses. Me, I didn’t know. I wasn’t much aware of anything at all till the roots of the big tree out front heaved the sidewalk and invaded a huge pipe coming out of me.

My first stirrings were of a plumber’s snake heading out into my nether regions. What a disgusting way to become self aware. And it didn’t stop there. The whole plumbing crew had to come out and dig up a fair part of the yard.

I was just getting over it when they tramped and pounded the earth back down and resodded the yard. There was a family here and a very disturbed one.

There was a mom and a dad, just like every house on my block, even at the other end going the other way who claims my status. There were two boys. One tiny girl. Not all that unusual. But everyone living here was in a constant state of alert and recovery.

The oldest boy had a room of his own. The tiny girl was guarded and kept in the bedroom or under the watchful eye of the mom and dad.

The boy moved in with a history and the parents were trying to live it down, stuff it under a cushion. Hiding. They put the boy in school but he wasn’t doing so well. No other kids came visiting. But they didn’t visit the younger boy either.

Again, you should come back next week, you don’t have to hang around.

The boy smuggled in a frog one day. He latched his door and laid the frog out on his hardwood floor. He studied it. Then put it into a zip lock bag and squashed all of the air out of it. He waited. The frog struggled for far too long. My discomfort grew. He kept that suffocated frog for a long time. He slept with it for a few nights, touching himself and the frog. Then he retired the loathsome rotting creature to a bottom dresser drawer.

One day while the kid was at school his mother came in to put some clothes away and saw the vile thing. She shuddered. Stuffed the clothes in and fled the room.

She kept this to herself. What good would it do to tell someone. Everyone knew anyway. She hugged her baby girl tight. Dabbed at her eyes, drew a resigned breath and went on with her day.

If you are still here, you might as well stay.

It was that very night that the kid came home with a baby kitten. Grey striped and at the gawky stage where it seemed scrawny all ears and skinny furred pointy tail.

He didn’t ask about having the kitten. He said he got it outside the store, someone had a batch in a cardboard box. It was free.

The mom and dad looked away in horror.

The kid got his dinner like every other night his little brother like his mom and dad knew. He didn’t know what he knew but he knew.

The kid rummaged through one of the kitchen catch all drawers and left the kitchen with the kitten and some super glue. His mom stifled a scream. The dad got up, grabbed his jacket and said he was going out and asked if she needed anything.

The little brother clung to his mother. They all wanted to escape the horror that awaited. But where would they go?

Of course the kitten all full of spunk scratched at the boy. The boy took the tube of glue and began by gluing the kitten’s eye closed. On the second eye, the poor thing was fighting so hard the glue oozed out and attached the animal to the murderous kid’s fingers.

The kid had quite a fight on his hands, deservedly so. At the first yowling the mom gathered up the baby girl and the little boy. They ran out the front door and down the block the other way so that when they left I was actually the first house on the right.

By the time they got back, the boy had the lips sealed on the kitten and had clipped the fur away that kept his hand fast to the crazed creature.

The family regained some sanity and crept back into the house late that night. There were muffled noises from the boy’s room.

It was several weeks later when in a fit of distraction the mom left the baby girl in the highchair, just for a moment, a toilet in the upstairs bathroom was over flowing. She had just finished mopping up when she screamed and bounded down the steps into the kitchen where the child was bowed over the baby girl.

The mom grabbed a butcher’s knife and plunged it all the way into the kid’s back. The kid wasn’t all that big and the point came out through his chest. He looked down at it in an amused sort of way. He was further amused when the point withdrew.

He giggled or hic cupped, his mom couldn’t decide so she plunged the knife one more time, this time through his side up by his arm pit downward through what she hoped included his heart.

The kid fell to his side on the floor and whimpered. Then drew one last breath.

To the mom’s horror, the kid died grinning. Not grimacing as the first responder would have said, he was grinning.

The mom scooped up the baby girl, got the little brother and went into the living room where they watched cartoons until the dad came home.

There were never any first responders. The dad called to pull the kid out of school. They were okay with it, who wanted to deal with the kid anyway. It was so easy.

The dad took the kid’s shell away, I don’t know where. The family went on to live a regular life but I couldn’t stand any of them. It was just too messed up for me and all I wanted was to just stop being. I wish I have never become aware. I wish I had never been.

I’m here all the time, remembering every torturous detail, knowing how demented and messed up a single group of people can be. As a house, I may never be right. I am sure whatever movie the Last House on the Left is will never compare to the horror I see.

The Last House on the Left

Come back next Friday for a less Creepy Read.

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