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What rots a house?

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By Michael HarrisonPublished about a year ago 3 min read
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What rots a house?
Photo by doozydoom on Unsplash

First it starts slow. You might not even notice it at first thought. Vines creeping up start out as decorations. They bring smiles and joy, leaves and fruit. They reach windows, trellises, flower boxes. Starting out as green and full of life they reach the roof before long. Clawing at the attic, where memories and love lives, reminding us of our past and our present. Before long they become hard. Woody. Covered with scars and knotted bark. The leaves die-off slowly and fall, berries sour and fall, landing where no one will see them, sinking slowly into the soft ground.

The bushes and trees take notes from the vines. They have learned the proper way to grow in the stolen light of another. They start to cover the windows on the ground floor, causing inhabitants to recede to the upper floors. Light slowly leaks from the house leaving only shadows where once were parties. A snow like dust accumulates on furniture, pianos go out of tune. Light bulbs are nothing but broken and burnt fuses all throughout. Eventually all the light and love that remains hides upstairs, back towards the memories of younger days, leaving the present all together in the past. Those bushes reach the upper floors, leaving only the edges of windows for light to creep through. As roots tear apart concrete and water begins to leak through, soaking the basement in a sour bath, drenching all things that make up the foundation of this place. It starts to tilt, leaning slowly towards the ground like a shadow at dusk.

After comes the mosses, molds, and mushrooms to feed on the final decay. Where water seeped through the cracks, they fill in the spaces where doubt remains. In these doubts, those monsters begin to take hold. Rotting away the base is how all houses come down, but it is a slow burn. You never notice the initial signs of mold. Its spotted colors creeping along baseboards and shower curtains, filling up spaces under sinks where they lurk waiting for unsuspecting hands. They leave spaces for mushrooms, those jealous beings. They crave the life that others hold. They force through, mycelium like tendrils in the mind, grasping on and siphoning nutrients out like a fungal vampire.

Those tendrils break down the doors. They open all the remaining floodgates, leaving only a skeleton of a home, leaving it a sad graveyard of memories. Behind broken window panes and leaning chimneys, the ghosts of olden days are left behind, to haunt in the silence of a rotting wood. Their cries mimic the wails of the wind, creaking, groaning old trees scratch and leave the haunted halls empty, hollow, and solemn.

This rotted corpse leaves fading trees in its wake, old knotty oaks reach their witchy fingers towards the sky, grasping at the dying daylight. Desolation emits from the eyes of ghostly great horns that wait to inflict death on the remaining innocent creatures, the mice who don't see it coming. Walkways become broken bones, teeth missing from a smile that once was. Gates grounded, buried in their shallow grave of leaves. Not even the street is safe, seemingly sinking into the very earth it was put there to control.

This is the way a home rots. As the flesh falls away, it leaves behind this skeleton, eyes drained of light and facing the slowly approaching end. It sucks the life from around it, dragging the living into its shallow grave. Few can escape the gravity of this, a black hole pulling light down into the depths of your mind, where nothing ever leaves. These memories fade, creeping slowly to black.

HorrorShort Story
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About the Creator

Michael Harrison

Adventurer and nature enthusiast. Aspiring children's book author, novelist, and poet. Perpetual dreamer. My thoughts and ramblings are lost within the multitudes of notebooks I purchase and I don't have any hesitation in adding one more.

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