Member-only story
Nostalgia and Horror
And a cup of coffee to go
The skeletons of memories were scattered about the landscape of his childhood. It had been almost forty years since Dermott had visited the neighborhood where he grew up. He had plenty of happy memories but those memories no longer seemed to connect with the stage upon which they occurred.
The streets were still all in the same place. The houses were still there. But his memories were not. His memories were only within himself.
The trees were either much taller or no longer there, only their stumps giving evidence of their history. Some of the homes had been fixed up and added onto while others were in a state of deterioration. The grocery store had a new name and the shopping mall was boarded up. The strip shopping center had all different stores. The school had a new wing as did the hospital.
Dermott could not visit the old neighborhood without driving by the house where he grew up. The first thing he noticed was that the front yard was now enclosed by a chain-link fence and inside that fence were two dogs. He remembered how his mother had vociferously complained about the next-door neighbor’s barking dog and now there were two dogs in what used to be her own yard. This made Dermott smile.
