Is this Available?

Jacob walked up the driveway of the abandoned house and spoke into the camera lens. “I didn’t expect to do a run today,” he told his future YouTube viewers, “but the surprise was too good to pass up.”

He walked backwards, making sure the house was in view, its punched-out windows and peeling paint behind him.

“I found this pair of Jordan’s on marketplace, and they look exactly like the ones I had when I was little.”

He turned his head and gazed at the house for a moment while holding his camera still. This

was his forty-fifth video showcasing a crumbling relic that nostalgia left to rot. As the number of views and subscribers to his channel climbed toward the hundred thousand mark, he’d become fully aware that it was the sense of lost time his followers wanted to hear about. They’d comment on how some rooms reminded them of their own childhoods, about the immaculate toys that’d been left behind under broken and rotted ceilings. They messaged him things like: ‘steal that, ship it to me. I’ll pay’, but Jacob wasn’t a thief. He believed preservation was true nostalgia, because once something’s moved, it’s tainted.

He spoke to his viewers again: “… and here’s the kicker – and I don’t know if this is a prank – but the house appears to be abandoned, like someone wanted me to do a run instead of just giving me the shoes.”

Movement tickled his peripherals at the top of the house. Or at least, he thought it had. Maybe, he thought, whatever transpires here could get me over the hundred thousand threshold.

He filmed a long shot of the house with his camera. Nothing but cracks and snaps chattered from the woods behind.

“Did you hear that?” he asked the lens. He closed in on the front porch and the house drowned out the shot.

He peered inside the porch with his viewfinder, and the shoes were sitting there… alone… undisturbed. The peeling brown paint on the doorframe suggested the porch hadn’t been used in some time, and that nobody had been near the place in years.

“There they are,” he trembled. He knocked on the porch door and paint shavings floated to the cracked patio stones at his feet.

“Hello?”

He heard only the sounds of falling leaves and dead branches from the steps of small animals.

He knocked once more and waited for the silence to break. It didn’t, so he grabbed the rusted handle and pressed his thumb into the circle latch and pulled. The screen creaked loud, and the smell hit him.

There was a floral aroma that reminded him of October when relatives would visit for Thanksgiving, and his mother would put on a show. All she wanted them to think was: “Wow. Everything is perfect here. The towels are hung neatly. There isn’t a speck of dust anywhere”, paving the way for Christmas where nothing ever went wrong and everyone was happy: turkey, gravy, that fake strawberry scent on old Christmas ornaments, pulling those crackers with mini bangs and tiny trinkets; the kids playing with toys in the basement while the adults enjoyed their libations upstairs; his mother’s muffled shouts through the ceiling drowning out the others.

He’d been shooting haphazardly at the front door as he stood between the screen and the shoes. He snapped out if it and spoke to the lens: “Normally these houses smell like basement or mold, but this one’s different.”

He stopped filming and bent down to inspect the shoes, sliding the camera behind his back. The strap rubbed against his neck, a divine comfort he’d grown to love.

The white leather sides were strikingly white for a twenty-six-year-old shoe. The gold clips on the ’97 Jordan OG TAXIs glistened in the overcast light. The TWO-3 inlay on the tongue, and black base with yellow zigzag on the sole boosted his excitement through the roof.

The overcast glow from outside reflected off the treated leather on the shoes. He placed them back down on the mat and stuffed his left foot inside one. He hooked his finger into the loop on the back, and his heel slid in like a Tetris piece clearing a row. He pulled the right one on and placed his feet firmly on the welcome mat. He let out a long, heavy breath.

He grabbed his camera and the strap rubbed against his neck again. He began filming with a smile.

“I feel like a kid again,” he recorded. “I’ve never known comfort like this,” he had trouble finding words, just like when he was little. “I… um… uh…” he felt a stone slide down his throat, and the splash of it hitting his stomach.

He stopped talking because he realized he’d pressed the LIVE STREAM button instead of RECORD, and he felt a seed of shame sprouting; his skin iced over and he almost shut the recording down, but a comment from JAY_ASBESTOS, one of his regular viewers, read:‘right in the feels, my dude’, and Jacob let the tear that he’d been afraid of run down his cheek. He pushed the door open, the pitch-black maw of an ancient beast loomed before him, and he thought: Was the door already open when I got here?

He stood in a place that was both familiar and alien. The smell from earlier had disappeared, and in its place: wet concrete. Softened drywall. Peeling paint and moldy carpets. He could see absolutely nothing. Were all of the windows covered? It was the middle of the day. He looked at the live stream monitor on his phone and realized his viewer count was climbing higher than it had ever been. Instead of retreating down the road to the safety of his home, he braved the house like he had braved others many times before.

The darkness swallowed him whole as the door shut behind him. It wasn’t a slam, but a gentle click, which troubled him. All of his senses doubled except his sight, and he felt naked. “I can’t see a thing,” he told the lens. That was when he heard laboured breathing coming from behind a door along the corridor before him.

A cold sliver shivered through his nerves when a slice of light blazed at the base of a doorframe. He felt smaller than he’d ever been.

The sound of a phone being picked up from a land line receiver came from the other side, and a woman sobbed: “I made a mistake.” Her voice crackled. “I’m sorry. I wanna take it back.”

Silence.

Then: “Can I please? I don’t wanna do this anymore.”

Jacob’s phone vibrated. He opened the live stream monitor and a comment from someone named 4BEAR read: Let them in, Jacob. They’re coming to take her. It’s going to be fine.

There was a loud knock at the front door. Jacob froze. He felt as if his own skin had cowered away, leaving him soft and small like the runt in a litter of twelve.

“Let them in,” another comment read, this time from someone else, and there was another knock, only louder. Many others on the livestream demanded that Jacob let in whoever knocked, until the comment screen was flooded with text. The sound of the door being violently attacked rose like a symphony swelling to a crescendo, and another comment read: SHE’S YOUR MOTHER, OPEN THE DOOR.

The voice stopped, the door along the side of the hall went dark, and the house was silent.

There was a single footstep outside the front door, soft like the sound of a cigarette butt being crushed.

The door opened, and a shadow projected, thin and tall against the printed floral wallpaper opposite the entrance. Jacob held his breath as a light underneath a different door shone from down the hallway. He ran towards the blazing sliver, as it was the only light he could see. He thrust his shoulder against the wood while twisting the knob and barrelled through as white light washed over him. He closed it, hyperventilating, his back against the door.

He noticed his hands were very small. He grabbed his camera which was now a child’s toy instead of a digital one. He shook as he now stood in his childhood bedroom.

Against the wall before him was his old dresser where he’d placed Looney Tunes stickers on the drawer panels, and everything else about it was the same except for one detail: The mirror that usually sat on top was missing. It lay smashed on the floor, its shards hiding in the carpet with little white pills like a trail mix from hell. His bed lay tussled up with Ninja Turtles linens strewn about. On his nightstand was a Beast Wars transformers next to a red lamp.

The venetian blind that usually hung low over his window had its string pulled to the floor, letting a bright sun burn the blue walls inside to a shiny grey. Jacob walked to the window and peered out, and the swing set his father had bought him stood in the grass as bright as the first time it had come out of the box.

He had an overwhelming urge to use the swings. Instead of walking back through the house, he pulled the window open so he could climb out into the backyard.

Careful, focused footsteps came from down the hall. His heart beating faster now, he popped the screen out of the frame, and it landed on the green grass below. He felt a breeze on his face as he vaulted himself over the frame, letting his feet hang for a moment before letting go, and bending his knees to absorb the shock while dropping onto the grass.

He looked back up at the window, took a few steps back to see the person that had been following him, and a sun glare burned his eyes. He blocked it with the back of his hand, then rubbed his eyes with his fists. When his vision returned, he saw that his hands were still small, but the sky was overcast once again, and the house before him stood abandoned, its windows punched out like a boxer’s teeth.

The green grass was gone, and the overgrown earth had returned, and he noticed a man standing in the window above with a strap around his neck with a fancy camera attached. Jacob waved, and the man waved back.

He walked over to the swing, which was no longer shiny and new, but rusted and ancient.

He found the swing seat hanging off one chain while the other chain hung freely. He held the seat in his hand, examining it.

The man came out of the back door of the house and shut it behind him. He wore cracked and dirty basketball shoes that dragged against the ground.

“Nice shoes.”

“Thanks. Can I push you?” The man said.

“It’s broken.”

The man walked over and examined the seat closely. “I think I can fix it.”

He looped the rusted chain through the bracket attached to the swing seat and took his camera off his neck. He removed the strap from the camera and set it down on one of the warped wooden steps that led to a slide. He looped the camera strap through the seat bracket and chain link and tied a knot.

“There. Good as new,” The man said.

Jacob grabbed the chains in his small hands and hopped on.

The man pressed lightly against his back, pushing him through the air.

He smiled. He saw through the reflection of the broken kitchen window on the main level that the man behind him was smiling too.

Jacob tucked his bare feet under himself, then kicked them out as October air rushed past him. A scent of floral incense wafted from the kitchen, and his mother was now there, looking out through the broken window. She forced a smile under her mascara-crusted eyes.

“I’m sorry,” she mouthed through charcoal-stained teeth.