Time Shall Pass

            The final cardboard box filled with mumbo-jumbo was in the house. I thanked my friends with hot pizza and beer, they left, and I lay down in the empty house to hear my heart beat with its own.

            “Hello, old friend,” I sighed, closing my eyes with a smile. The upstairs master bedroom door creaked open a little in response, and I laughed. No one knew this house as well as I did, and no one was willing to live in it after finding out that it was haunted. But it wasn’t haunted by evil spirits or anything. It was haunted by memories. Memories of a child being beaten and scarred both mentally and physically, yes, this house remembered.

           

            “Elise!” Her father shouted from the bottom of the stairs, a broken orange crayon in his tightened fist. “Elise! Get the fuck down here!”

            Elise hid under her bed, tears streaming down her seven year old trembling chin. Her body tucked tightly into itself from fear of what her father was about to do to her. She heard him yell her name again before deciding to bolt from her room to his. He wouldn’t think she would be in his room, she had never dared to go in before, but she saw the door creak open from her hiding spot and hoped it was a sign from God.

            Her father saw her long blonde hair slip into his room, and his face went from an inferno like rage, to a demoniac glee. His favorite past time was beating his daughter, the only reminder of his slut of a wife that left him. He didn’t even want the little brat in the first place, and here he was, stuck with the little bitch.

            Kicking open the door to her room, he called out her name in anger, made a show of his attempts to find her by throwing her things everywhere, breaking things against the walls of the house and scarring them from his actions. Then he slowly turned to his room, pushed open the door, and sat on his bed.

            “Children always hide under beds. Fucking morons,” he thought to himself with a smirk. And as quickly as he had sat down, he had thrown his own bed over itself, to find nothing. He heard his closet door open and the pads of Elise’s feet run to the hall. Turning and snarling like a bull, he ran at her, but the door flung in his face.

            The house trembled, and groaned, and Elise could hear her father screaming. When the police had come, her father had been buried and stomped on by every piece of furniture in his room.

            Elise, now fully grown, stood at the master bedroom door, the room that had belonged to her father, and slid her hand against the wood frame. She had decided, when she was little, that she would thank this house for saving her life. And now she would, by taking care of every little need it had. Just like a parent should their child.