Anything you want

A break from horror. Notes on the childhood home. 12/18/25.

Dec 19, 2025

The rain falls soft. It’s the rain that is barely even falling, that feels like mist, but you can hear it patter just so on the leaves above. A chime responds to the hush of the wind - gently, once every couple of moments. Some sounds carry so much over the water.

The yard is on the inside bend of a river. You hear something drop into the water every so often, usually a limb or a fish jumping. The trees overhead are timeworn oaks, all well over 80 years old. They each have branches that swing close to the ground and all create a whisper together when the wind blows in the wintertime.

Your winters are short here - too short for your taste. You can enjoy the cold. The winter is waning even now in January, you can be outside with no shirt and feel the rainmist on your shoulders and listen to the trees for as long as you like as the wind lulls them about.

The sky is overcast, even now in the night. The moon is back there somewhere and is big and full and bright, but you’d never know that for sure. You can only see the soft gray glow of the blanket of fog that looms above the river. The treetops blot most of it out but every so often you can see a hole in the fog.

In these moments of nothing, you’d wish you were fully alone - but you are not. You have the light of the neighbors left and right, one porch light on one side and a string of fairy lights on the other.

The space by the tin fences are shrouded in shadow now - blacker than anything around. You’re aging, when you were a kid you could probably run around here with no lights at all, in fact you did. Now you walk with your hands just in front of you in case you miss something.

There are things hanging all about the yard. The chimes, for one, still humming with the wind. Children’s obstacles - a clothesline of climbables and swingables. Another clothesline, but for clothes, shirts and jeans swaying softly as the line bounces to and fro.

This moment of solitude takes you through the ages. You could be young again if you like. You could be in high school and sitting on the roof, gazing at the water. You could be a kid, running to the trampoline before taking your school clothes off. You could be anything you’d like with the wind and trees and darkness and the water.