I know that writing my story violates some ancient conspiracy of silence, but I don’t care. The things that I’ve experienced, the things that I know, are too big to keep hidden from humanity anymore. You have a right to know what is happening under your feet before it shows up at your front door.

  My name is Stephen Jensen, and to tell you my story, I must begin with a bit of my personal history. I belonged to a small, but not tightly knit, family of my mother, my father, and myself. My father did not get along with my grandfather, his father. Until recently, I didn’t know the origin of their disagreement. I had just assumed that it was the cultural differences between a man content to live in the backwoods and a son who couldn’t get far enough away.

  My grandfather lived alone in a small house deep in the woods of East Texas. My grandmother died when my father was very young, and my grandfather never remarried and never spoke about her except to say that he loved her very much. My father grew up and lived in that same small house until he ran away from home when he was a teenager.

  He was an unhappy man for most of his life and struggled with depression and addiction until he met my mother. Something in her pulled him out of his loathing of life, and they married, eventually giving birth to me. Growing up, my parents and I visited my grandfather only on a few occasions, usually for Christmas or Thanksgiving.

  I enjoyed my time at that small house deep in the piney woods. It was refreshing, if not even a little frightening, to go out alone and explore the dark forest and narrow creeks that ran around the property. It was a place where a boy could feel truly free, away from the watchful eyes of parents and teachers.

  I also enjoyed being with my grandfather, and he always took a special liking to me as well. I always assumed it was because I was his only grandchild from his only son. At the time, I didn’t question the simple, childish pleasure of being his favorite. Looking back, I now know why he doted on me.

  As I grew older, my father’s depression returned and even grew worse. He became withdrawn from me and my mother, and started drinking again. Even when he was physically present, his mind was far away. The oppressive loneliness in the house wore down on my mother, and she eventually divorced him when I was twelve years old. She won custody of me, I don’t even remember him fighting her over it.

  I only visited my father every other weekend and some holidays. I saw him even less when I started high school and became more interested in girls and baseball than spending tedious weekends with a man who would rather bury himself in work than show any interest in his only son.

  After the divorce, I never saw my grandfather again. When I was in college and out on my own, I always intended to visit him, but I was too busy living up to the demands of a baseball scholarship. And after college, the burdens of adulthood hit me.

  Jobs were hard to come by. Though I was an adequate baseball player, a tenacious shoulder injury meant I was never going to qualify for anything more than an intramural league. I took whatever jobs I could get so I could pay the bills for my shitty apartment that I share with a roommate I barely like.

  It was at one of those jobs when I got the message from my father that my grandfather had died. According to my grandfather’s wishes, there was no funeral, and his body was cremated within a few days of his death. One day he was here, then he was gone. I couldn’t even remember what he looked like.

  His house deep in the piney woods passed on to my father, who refused to have anything to do with it. My father said he planned to sell it and offered to pay me a little bit of money to renovate it before the sale. So one day when the weather was nice, I called in sick to my crappy job and took a three-day weekend to drive out to the property.

  I remember the drive out there quite well. It was a spring morning, and the bright sun had not yet warmed the air. It was that schizophrenic time in Texas when you needed a sweater in the morning, a t-shirt in the afternoon, followed by that same sweater by dinner time.

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  The trip to the property was much longer than I remembered as a child. First an interstate highway, then a state highway, followed by a series of county roads, and finally a long, dusty dirt road that led me to the small house that I remembered.

  It was tucked away in a small clearing surrounded by tall pine trees, which created something of a front and back yard of reddish-brown pine needles. When I got out of my truck, the first thing that hit me was the heavy smell of pine.

  Smells always bring back the strongest memories, and this time was no different. For a moment, I was that little boy climbing out of my parent’s car to be greeted by a hug from my grandfather. I half-expected to see him standing on the small wooden porch in front of the house.

  The white paint on the house had chipped and flaked off after decades of blistering Texas summers, freezing winters, and bouts of torrential rainfall. The door was unlocked, as it always was. No one even knew this place existed, so how would a thief ever find it to steal anything? And what would he expect to find in an abandoned, dilapidated house anyway?

  No one could have imagined what my grandfather really kept hidden in that small country house.

  I entered the front door into a small living room, just large enough for a couch and a recliner. Hanging over the couch was an old photo of my grandfather when he was a young man with my father from when he was a boy. I believe that picture had not moved since I was a child. I hope it is still there.

  I never saw a picture of my grandmother, so I didn’t know what she looked like. I don’t know if my father had either.

  There was a small kitchen with a gas stove fueled by propane tanks my grandfather would bring in from town. The kitchen was so small that there wasn’t even enough room for a refrigerator, so he set it out on the back porch.

  The house stood as I imagine my grandfather had left it. It was lived in, but neat. Any amount of clutter in a house of that size would have been too much for anyone to bear. Even the bed was still made, as if he had just stepped out to go into town.

  I walked through the house and the area around it for a little while. It felt good to stretch my legs, but mainly I wanted to relive any emotional connection I had to the place. I found the tree where I carved my initials into the bark with a knife my grandfather gave me for Christmas when I was a boy. I found the creek where I spent an entire afternoon as I watched a little paper boat my grandfather folded for me float down through the roots of the trees that grew along it. I sat on a dead tree trunk and listened to the cardinals as they fussed at me for invading their territory.

  I experienced all the pleasures and confusions that come from revisiting a place that was important to you years ago but has changed just enough that most connections are lost or quickly forgotten. I knew it was a good house and a great property. I would have bought it from my father, but there was no way I could have afforded it. I doubt that he would have just given it to me. I could tell by the sound of his voice when he told me his intention to sell the land that he wanted no connection to the place anymore, even through his own son.

  I knew that whoever bought the land would tear down the house without a second thought. The furniture would be dumped in a landfill, and the lumber in the walls would be reclaimed and end up in some hipster’s privacy fence.

  I think these realizations caused me to push away any connection I had to the place as a means to protect myself from the inevitable loss I would feel once it was all gone. I shifted my focus away from the memories to pay attention to the condition of the house itself, the reason for my trip in the first place.

  Walking around the outside, everything seemed fine. I didn’t notice any leaks or water damage from the heavy rain that sometimes comes in East Texas. If my father wanted, then I could paint the outside to make it look nicer, but I’d have to talk to him about that later.

  I went inside and didn’t see any structural damage, but I wasn’t really expecting to find any. I turned on the water faucet in the sink, and water came out. It was rusty and smelled bad, but it was there. Just to help secure the house, I turned off the water and unplugged the propane tank so they wouldn’t leak. With the flip of a light switch, I discovered that the electricity still worked. But I wanted to unplug the big appliances just so they wouldn’t slowly drain the power.

  I approached the refrigerator intending to make sure it was empty before I turned it off and let a bunch of food rot inside. I pulled open the door and saw that the fridge was empty of food, but there was something else in there.

  Something I never would have expected.