First Impressions

The first thing I noticed before I opened my eyes was the darkness. It clung to me like a damp, musty cloak left hiding in the closet of a creepy yellow house at the end of a forgotten oak-lined dirt road somewhere in South Georgia. She was nothing like the drab traditional tabby structures that stood across the marsh. A turn of the century Victorian relic, she must have loomed spectacular in her golden years with beautiful bay windows and ornamental columns supporting intricate arches with delicate lace-like detailing draping down from her third-story gables. A lush garden in the front yard with sweet red roses and a babbling fountain once surrounded by fan palms and an iron gate now grew thick with thorny weeds, and her bright yellow facade faded in the sunlight to reveal the decay of a hundred years. The smell of her old rotten wood pierced my nose, and a staleness filled my lungs with each breath I took. I lay quietly in a pine box beneath her shadow, inhaling and exhaling the past, wondering if I would ever escape.

My eyes remained shut, my lashes matted together like tangled cobwebs, but I was wide awake in that eternal resting place and foolishly dreaming of the fabulous parties that must have been held upstairs in the parlor. Jazz music drifting from a victrola permeating the air in each room like cigar smoke, lively swing dancing and a dapper dressed fellow groove walking through the French doors into the drawing room where a fashionable young lady in a flapper dress stood near a grand fireplace bursting into spirited laughter between sips of Merlot and puffs of her long cigarette... perhaps a first date or maybe their 10th anniversary - who could tell? Surely there had been happiness in this place. But it was long forgotten by the time I managed to open my eyes in that terrible darkness below the baseboards.

Heavy footsteps approached the wine cellar door, the kind of footsteps that belong to a man, footsteps that rattled my bones with each pounding of the subflooring. Keys jingled in his pocket as he fumbled them between his fat fingers searching for the perfect one to unlock the only barricade between my future and his unfortunate demise. A peculiar excitement stirred in my body as the door swung open and a dim light fell through the slats of my pine box. My mouth watered and my lips quivered with tasty anticipation. How long had I been asleep before today? How many times had the sun risen and set exchanging places with the moon above me? How many years had I gone undisturbed in my lifeless slumber without the libation of blood? The memory of my own death infuriated me as I ripped off that damp, musty cloak of darkness and lunged thirstily for the throat of the fat-fingered man.

What a mess I made of him! Bottles of Merlot crashed to ground and mingled with blood in a crimson spectacle as he flailed about the cellar floor in fear and torment. I had waited for this first date with immortality much longer than I had ever been alive. My patience had grown too thin. My dream was finally manifesting itself, and this poor gentleman was feeding my relentless desire to live again.

In a moment, he was slumped over in the corner of the cellar behind barrels of whiskey, and I was walking through brightly painted dust-filled rooms full of covered antique furniture with 12-foot-high ceilings and rows of tall windows draped in thickly lined linen curtains, likely once hung to cool the large spaces and keep the sunlight off the polished wooden floors. With the fat-fingered man's blood reviving my spirit, I was determined to breathe new life into this house above my pine box as well. She was too beautiful to let waste away in the South Georgia heat. She needed someone to care for her as deeply as the man who had built her. She had grown weary of holding only faint memories of sunlit strolls through the rose garden and fancy late-night soirees. Her rusted iron gate no longer held back potential traspassers, and true danger threatened each ascent of her decrepit staircase. She needed someone to love her despite the first impression she made. I provocatively ran my pale fingers across an ornate mantle above a fireplace in the kitchen and whispered into the air, "I'm home, my Love." It was an end to a long wait for us both.