Word Count: 388
Timothy had never been in the attic. His mother said it was filled to the rafters with goblins that ate little boys. He tried once. The door was of course locked and he never thought about going up there again. Goblins aren’t all that scarily real when you’re thirteen.
Now as a grown man with the burden of the death of the last of his parents, he had to clean out and sell the old house. It’s a sad time made sadder going through years of a house’s personal little treasures. Each with a patina of memory. Here were his Golden Books with the voices of mom and dad’s bedtime stories. The old metal kitchen table and chairs that have come back in style. His father’s easy chair that was off limits to anyone else. His mother’s cranberry glass imprisoned behind locked breakfront glass doors.
The basement and the garage were oddly the easiest. Tools were respectfully hung neatly on pegboards and so easily sorted and saved. Then Timothy tackled the attic.
He found the key in that catch-all kitchen drawer where everything important in our lives is kept. He felt a twinge of childish excitement as he flicked on the light switch and mounted the stairs. It had a musty smell as he’d expected. Some tables and chairs that he’d thought had been thrown away. A headboard from a bed he’d had as a kid. And boxes and boxes and boxes, all neatly labeled in his mother’s fine hand. He opened a box labeled the year he was born.
He sat crossed legged on the floor and read for almost an hour. Here were the goblins, the ghosts of her past. A lover. A man destined to remain a secret, locked in an attic away from the reality of her life that was a husband, a son. A home with an attic to hide him in.
Timothy started to cry. For his mother and a love she had to eventually deny but felt the need to hold onto like a birthday card. For his father…had he known?
He stopped thinking, looked up at the sound. Like whispers of giggles. Rushed tiptoed steps. He saw them, the real ones, just an instant before they set upon him with teeth long as nails and claws drawing blood.
