Monster House

By Ashley Denchfield

The date is June 10th, and it is eighty-one degrees outside in Potomac, Maryland. I am wearing a tight-fitting black long sleeve shirt with a hood and a denim baseball hat that says BOSS bedazzled across it. Big, circular sunglasses cover the upper half of my face. I am six days away from my twenty-first birthday.

I am sitting in the passenger seat of my sister’s car. Her hair is tied back in a pink-checkered scrunchie, and her bare neck reveals the splotchy application of self-tan that she applied the night before. It takes the shape of a three on her neck, with two perfect circular ridges separating the tan and pale skin. We are both covered in little pricks from the air conditioner blowing onto us. We have been driving for seven hours through Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley from Asheville, North Carolina, to get here.

Do you want to see the House?

She asks this as we’re crossing the state border into Maryland. We’re about twenty minutes shy of the House that’s reappeared in most of my nightmares for the last ten years.

Yes. She clicks her blinker down to change lanes.

I threw up the first time I came back, she tells me.

My mind slips into a quiet, droning buzz. I don’t know what I will feel until we arrive, and I cannot think about it until we do. I roll down the window and mosquitos pour into the car like water.

We pull onto the strip of road that leads to our neighborhood, and I think I’ve seen these trees. I have no way of knowing if they are the same trees I looked at through the backseat of my father’s car, or if I’m searching for some sort of comfort in a place that feels familiar and new to me at once. Regardless, I’m looking at the sprawling branches, asking myself which of us lived here first.

The car rolls to the right, and we are at the mouth of the neighborhood. There is a stone monument announcing where we are. When we were kids, we sat on the cool granite sweating away our summer days. With the turn of each car onto the road, our voices screamed at them, HONK YOUR HORN, pumping our fists into the air and raising them victoriously if the car obliged.

We drive past an elderly couple walking their dog. I wave at them out of habit. I remember the story my father’s ex-fiance used to tell about coming to see us girls in North Carolina for the first time. It’s nothing like Maryland here, the people actually WAVE at you, she’d say incredulously, enunciating wave like waay-ve.

But the couple today, here in Maryland, wave back at me, and it has been years since his fiance, or since I, have lived here. Neither the street nor the people remember what happened here, and they wouldn’t recognize me if they did.

The mundanity of the place is incomprehensible to me. I have come back here so many times in my mind. It is mine. Living in me only as bad and monstrous. I cannot see it as anything else.

Ours was the very last house on the street. We wheel around long curves in the road until I see the black gates of the House. They are smaller than I remember them being. I suppose I am bigger now, too.

The House looks exactly as I remember it. Stony and grey, with big, cherry-stained wooden doors. The pond in the front yard has been covered up, and the broken windows have been fixed.

I am overcome with the feeling that I’ve been tricked into returning to the scene of a crime. A sticky, hot feeling washes over me as I prepare to see my own body lying somewhere on the lawn. I stare at the House, willing it to show me something and terrified that the sight of it alone will reveal a truth to me that I cannot stomach.

I am waiting for something to happen. For myself as a girl to come running from the backyard screaming, her bob bouncing as her feet hit the concrete. For my father to emerge behind her, hands bare or wrapped around something hard and metal. I am waiting for anything at all.

But nothing comes. The House does not look scary, or haunted, or enclosed in darkness.

There is no stirring coming from within. It is just a house.

I try to peer through the windows, seated and still buckled in the passenger seat of my sister’s car, and I realize that another family lives here now. One that has normal dinners, and normal fights, that knows nothing of the family that lived here before them.

They moved into the House after the state of Maryland seized it. They fixed the broken windows and cleaned the corpses of birds that sat on the bathroom floor. They inherited the chandelier we left behind, and the arcade games downstairs, and they found the bunkers my father built. And they told themselves stories about the people who lived here before them—stories I don’t exist in.

I thought about knocking on the door and introducing myself. I wanted to see it as a home. I wanted to see myself as a daughter. I would have been so good at it. I would have known the way my mother took her coffee and how my father took his eggs. I would have not known the way my mother weeps, heavy and ugly, and the way my father looks when I need to Run.

But I’ve stopped running. This House is alive because I have made it so. It heaves and claws as I breathe life into it. Without me, it is just a house. Without the House, I have no witness.

I tell myself I am ready to let go. As I look at the House, and the House looks back at me, we say goodbye. Perhaps for the last time.

There is something unspoken between us, as unchanging as the passage of time. We both know what happened here.

Ashley Denchfield (she/they) is a senior at UNC-Chapel Hill. She is pursuing a degree in English, studying creative non-fiction. Her writing explores an unconventional and painful childhood, and trying to find magic and connection through it.