Connie Drywood's Short Story: The Haunted House

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They had left the cardboard boxes in the back of the car. Connie Drywood huddled behind the steering wheel and stared through the windshield, presumably at a house, with a flat expression across her face as if it were every other house in America. By now she was used to the middle of nowhere. Dead leaves swooned in the yard. Loose shutters banged in the windows. It was November, a cold day and the house, with its slanted roof and yellow siding, looked a bit like an oversized wedge of cheddar cheese. Back when they had closed the deal, Clay had called the place a fixer-upper. But there were two bedrooms on the second floor and he'd offered to give the smaller one to the baby. The front door swung open. Clay stepped out onto the porch, wearing mud-stained jeans and a sweatshirt from the …show more content…

“Should we go inside?” They went inside. There was no furniture in the house, only a paisley wallpaper and a vinyl carpeting (the cheap kind that snags your toenails) and a bay window that encased the living room. The house was built back in the seventies. Its previous owner was an elderly widow, who had died in the living room from having choked on a potato chip. But her lavender perfume had left a forever stench in the walls; each breath tasted like like dragging your tongue down a satin sheet. Connie followed Clay upstairs. They already knew the layout — they had attended a walk-through back in March, when Clay still worked at the auto garage and Connie still lived in the moments between pregnancy tests — but perhaps they needed an excuse to talk about something more than the baby. There were two bathrooms. One connected to the master bedroom. It featured an antique tub, an ornate beauty with a curved bottom and two knobs screwed above the faucet. Connie twisted the knobs. Stepping back, she watched lukewarm water pour from the spout. One room remained. They went down the hall to the baby's bedroom which looked more like a

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