The House in the Middle

Ever since Brian left for Military School all those years ago that I felt that somehow my life in our little town was incomplete.

So when I heard that he was coming over after all this time I felt a shiver going down my spine. As kids we had lived on the same street almost door to door. His was a couple of houses down the road. In between there was this green house, old and abandoned. 

The windows were shut tight and there was an atmosphere of resilient loneliness.

So when Brian cracked open the boards covering the windows with a solid kick, it’s as if that loneliness had suddenly burst into thin air.

“Come on Julia”, he said “I’ve always wanted to see what this place looked like from the inside”.

There wasn’t much to see, to be honest. The living room we were in was quite dim, so all we could see was a couple of broken chairs piled in the corner and a thin layer of dust covering the floor.

We moved on to the kitchen.

“You’re opening up a can of worms”, I said, as he reached for the cupboard.

“Don’t worry; you’re not afraid of ghosts are you?”

“No, literally, I mean that you’re opening up a can of worms.”

He let go a high-pitched youthful scream and did a little jump to the side, shaking of his entire body; feet to ears, then stared at me clumsily.

And as we looked at each other we realized how much time had passed, how we had aged but at the same time, how much had stayed the same.

We held that nostalgic stare for a while before the loud, screeching noise of a horn interrupted it and made us run for our lives.

Word Count: 298