October 2023 Fiction Project: The Witch House – Oct 2

Mondays suck.

Mom and my stepdad, Dave, were fighting again last night in the living room the whole time I was sitting in the kitchen and writing out my journal entry for English class. No big deal, nothing new, just my stepdad is a psychopath and my mom is not okay with it, but for the wrong reasons.

No, I’m not going to explain that.

Instead I’m going to explain why the kitchen is the most disturbing room in my stepdad’s house.

Which is why I was writing my journal entry there.

Stepdad Dave’s house is huu-uuge. And old.

Lots of creaky old wood, dusty shelves, chipped and stained and scraped paint that seems like it’s a hundred layers deep, short hallways at weird angles, hook-and-eye gate latches on the outsides of bedroom doors, gurgling pipes (and toilets), painted tin ceilings, and crazy floral wallpaper that seems to turn from a 2D illustration to 3D computer animated art if you stare at it too long.

It’s okay. Mostly.

The kitchen is disturbing, though.

The stuff in the kitchen is new compared to the rest of the house. The cabinets are new and the counters are new and the sink is new and the refrigerator is new and the floor tiles are new and the ceiling fan is new. Everything is new. Which is great.

Except it’s all wrong.

The gold on the gold handles of the fake wood cabinets is already peeling off, and every time Stepdad Dave goes into the kitchen he slams the cabinet doors so loud it sounds like someone getting hit. The floor tiles are already cracked and uneven and the fake stone countertops are already scratched and stained. The ceiling fan shakes whenever mom turns it on. It makes the light on the bottom of the fan shiver and the fan-speed chain click as it hits the glass lightbulb cover.

The oven is even wronger than that.

It’s built into some cabinets that sit in the middle of the floor in the kitchen. Stepdad Dave calls it his “kitchen island.”

But kitchen islands aren’t supposed to be round on one side and completely flat with a piece of plywood on the back.

There used to be a wall behind the cabinet, with a whole other room behind it.

Then Stepdad Dave decided to tear the wall out so he could make the kitchen extra large and put a “breakfast nook” by a window where the sun actually shines in.

Okay.

Good plan, bro.

Except it’s totally obvious that the kitchen is made out of two different rooms.

The cabinets in the back half of the kitchen are a different color, and are made of real wood, and have brass handles instead of gold-painted ones. The countertop is real speckled granite. The floor tiles are the same color, but shinier and less cracked. An ancient metal radiator sticks out of one wall (it doesn’t get hot, though). That whole wall looks like little kids wrote words all over the wall with green crayons and someone tried to use a magic eraser on them, but it didn’t work.

Stepdad Dave refuses to paint the wall, though.

He just says, “If you don’t like it, Jayla, you can do the dirty work.”

Sunday night, I did the dishes, then took out my notebook and wrote at the breakfast nook table, which looks like it came from a thrift store, and listened to the wind blowing outside and rattling the leaves.

Which was pretty cool.

Then I went downstairs with my snacks and watched an old black and white horror movie and fell asleep with the ghost cat on top of me. Also pretty cool.

In the morning I woke up to the sound of Stepdad Dave slamming cabinets and cursing, creaking the floor right over my head, in the back kitchen, that was, as he stomped around with his boots on.

Which meant that if I wanted to get ready for school, I would have to walk right past him so I could get from the basement stairs to the upstairs stairs. One of the kitchen doors looks right out at both sets of stairs.

All of which creak.

I waited as long as I could.

I went up the basement stairs slowly, carrying the empty plate and bowl and mug with me. Then I ran across to the upstairs stairs and ran up them two at a time.

The banging of the cabinets stopped.

He was listening to me.

I yelled, “Hi Dave! Good morning, Dave!” and closed my bedroom door.

After I went upstairs he stayed quiet, so quiet that I didn’t hear him when he appeared behind me from the living room as I was about to go out the front door to get to the bus.

“Good morning, Jayla!”

I yelped like a little kid in a horror movie and he just laughed.

Stepdad Dave is always particularly creepy on Monday mornings. I can’t explain it.

It’s like he gives off a smell that’s always there, but that I can only smell on Mondays.

He’s definitely more creepy on Mondays. The rest of the week I can mostly ignore him, though.

So it’s fine.