A Family of One's Own

The house teemed with the dichotomous sense of death and the burst of life that only a horde of vultures could bring. They had marched through the house, the way led by Jacob's numerous aunties and their by now well established system of colored stickers, marking out furniture, appliances and knick knacks for whoever had wanted them most, or who had won a battle of wills to take it home. Jacob didn't have a color in this sticker system. Hadn't wanted one. The house was his now, Martin had seen to that, let them take the furnishings to their heart's content. They would go home angry and he would lock the door behind them.

Nobody had been thrilled about him inheriting the house, not even himself. But if it made his family mad, Jacob wouldn't let them know that. It had been a happy place for him. One where he could be safe. While his aunt and uncle hadn't exactly been fabled nurturers, they had still taken him in when there was nowhere else to go. They had provided a safe place to be when he had none, and had not been remotely controlling as he learned how to be an adult. They even kept the basement as his bedroom when he left for college and always invited him back on breaks, never making him feel bad the times he made other arrangements with friends.

Still, despite being the closest thing they had ever had to a child, Jacob was surprised on Martin's tragic death that even before Aunt Maddy had passed away from Covid, they had agreed to basically give him everything of importance in the will. The house, their modest savings. Still, it was a shock to everyone that they had left it to him instead of his father or even their other siblings long estranged. That hadn't kept the vultures away though. Jacob may have got the house, but he didn't own a thing in it other than what was in the basement. To keep them all out, he had locked it up, grateful for once in his life the lock was outside, not in.

Presently, he was making another pot of coffee in the kitchen. While the aunties seemed busy putting different color stickers on various items around the house to catalog who had claimed what, he didn't feel like bothering to go to the store to replace the coffee pot, and the best strategy he landed on was to keep it running the whole time the family stickered anything that wasn't nailed down.

When the percolation came to a stop, he heard rummaging in the cupboard next to him as someone removed a mug. Muscling past him to pour one, without a single acknowledgement of the rudeness of the displacement, was none other than Jacob’s father. Choosing, yet again, that this was not a fight worth picking, Jacob waited until his father had finished to pour his own. He chose to let it be again when David reached out again to the pot, placing a red sticker on the old thing without a single fancy setting that he couldn't possibly genuinely want to replace his wallet-murdering percolator back home with several automated system settings and sustained temperature control.

Taking his sad mug into the living room to get a bit of space, Jacob opened his phone to order a french press and an electric kettle before he could forget. Here, the cannibalizing had been finished, the horde of relatives having begun with the couch where his father had won his first conquest, placing his red sticker before anybody else had a chance. Settling into the familiar worn leather, he glanced about the space, seeing a rainbow of bright paper circles declaring every imaginable thing from the Blu-ray player and tv down to small end tables and picture frames. Of all the books in the room, most had been claimed. Most, since the long row of worn mass market paperbacks on the third shelf, thrillers uncle Martin had written under the pen name Martin Grouse had criminally been left out of this charade, and were left without sporting a single embarrassing sticker. Certainly no red ones.

After about an hour of this, he got an alert on his phone. An email. Without any rush he opened it up to find, surprise, blah blah blah ,"We regret to inform you that we cannot accept your manuscript for publishing at this time, we encourage you..." more blah blah blah. Getting up, he allowed the remainder of his coffee to spill on the end table, and placed the mug down where it might leave a ring over the bright red sticker.

He went up a couple of levels, climbing up the downed ladder into the unfinished attic where the aunties were finishing up with the hardest selections they could make. His aunt and uncle weren't hoarders, but the attic was a place where innumerable antiques and, frankly, a whole lot of junk had gone to die over the past decades. Off in a corner, where it had been banished along with a surprisingly large collection of things nobody wanted as things continued to be sorted into piles in the middle of the floor, he grabbed the hard drive of an ancient Gateway desktop, yellowed with age and fuzzy from dust collection. Piece by piece he brought the rest of the computer downstairs into his den and set it up on a folding table ferreted out of the garage earlier. When it was all accounted for and plugged in, he turned it on to face what he was afraid of: A Windows 95 login screen.

With a shrug he left the basement, closed and locked the door again--really, why couldn't it have been locked from the inside?-- and left the house behind to be anywhere else until the vultures had moved on.

Some months later, Jacob sat in a sparse kitchen, furnished through a hobknob of ordered appliances, and free and cheap furniture found in town on some apps people use for getting rid of their trash and feel good about themselves when they get enough money to upgrade to something nicer.

It wasn't that bad really. Sure, the table's veneer was peeling and a thin collection of local brochures and ads sat under one leg to prevent its wobbly nature from toppling anymore glasses of orange juice, but it was good. It was all his. The only thing that he hadn't haggled or bought for himself was the coffee pot, which he had rescued from the trash bin outside when he noticed it there. A thorough washing and everything was just fine.

Sitting on the table was an open letter. He almost wished it were a rejection letter. If those things still came through snail mail he could at least have a collection of them in a binder or something to amuse himself. Perhaps he could mosaic them on top of the table and smooth some poured epoxy on top so he could stare at them and laugh every morning after he finally broke into the business. Dreams like these kept him submitting, but the cost efficient alternative of rejection emails took some of the mirth out of it.

The opened mail splayed out and held down in one stained corner by a half empty coffee mug was actually a bill Jacob didn't even realize he should have been dreading. Sure, he owned the house, and sure his uncle still had a small amount of savings he graciously left to Jacob as well when he passed, but it had evaporated fairly quickly in the last few months on student loans now that they had started back up again, and groceries. Without any solid income coming in, all Jacob had was some small dribble of freelance work to subsidize his existence. The lack of a rent or mortgage to plan for had come to just be one of the things he could take for granted, so the property tax bill had taken him by surprise, making him wonder if this was how his family had felt when they hadn't received anything of real worth in Martin and Maddy's will. The percolator signaled its job was complete with a loud hiss and a small burst of steam, summoning Jacob from the empty living room where several copies of Martin's books rested on the floor, underlined and flagged with alphanumeric codes corresponding to notepad entries in a complex system of thematic notetaking Jacob had developed in college. Grad students, he had been taught, were notorious for stealing ideas, and complex systems were about the only way he had thought of to solidly defend against the theft of his thesis. Old habits die hard.

There really hadn't been any need to drag his small collection of furniture up the stairs, and so Jacob's lair remained in the basement where he now brought his coffee. Sidling up to the folding table he still had the old Gateway stacked onto, he pulled the thrifted office chair over and got back to work. Pulling out a steno book where he had written down several ideas, he began to type them into the password bar one by one, striking a line through each failure and allowing each to join its brethren in the pages upon pages of similar failures more than half the pad thick.

Jacob's cursive was very aesthetically pleasing. He knew the Dewey decimal system like the order numbers on his favorite take-out menu brochures. For whatever reason, new ways of doing things did not tend to occur to him until he had managed to figure out an analog solution. This was his convenient excuse for why it took him so long to bring his problem to the internet. He found many answers, but most of them were too tech savvy for him to feel confident in trying. Finally he found on that exploited opening up the Windows folder through command prompt at startup, finding the login information for the username he was trying to get into (thankfully there was only one, helpfully written on the desktop monitor) and deleting it, permitting him to choose a new password on login. He wondered if there was a lot more corporate espionage in the 90s, things being this simple, but soon focused on the important thing: he was in!

There were two folders, one marked Drafts and another called Journal. Opening up the draft folder he quickly found many familiar titles, the books his uncle had already published. Of greater interest were the several files he didn't recognize. He opened one called "Silver River Nightmare'' and was unsurprised to find only a few pages of work for a draft with such an unpromising name. What's more, it stank. Not much use there. The next one, the more promising sounding "Where the Trees Land'' was a little longer, but much the same.

Through the evening, he worked his way through each of the drafts and found large windows in varying lengths and quality. At least some of these might be salvageable. He took to his notes to figure out ways to synthesize the pieces into something publishable, but nothing was jumping out at him.

It wasn't an invasion of privacy if his uncle was dead, right? People read other (dead) people's journals and private letters all the time. Histories, memoirs, journalists and the like. It wasn't really his thing, but maybe Jacob would one day write a biography of his uncle. If he did that, well it would be almost criminal negligence to the audience if he had access to his uncle's journal but didn't read it, right?

Though the morning sun had already crested over the pines, Jacob navigated to the last folder and opened. It might be said that Martin was a more prolific journaler than a novelist, and the list of entries were long. Jacob wasn't going to sit here in one setting to read them all, so he chose to forgo chronological order for now and just randomly clicked on one.

AUGUST 12. 1996

6:00 Asleep

6:30 Woke up, urinated, returned to bed.

8:30 Woke up, started breakfast. Black coffee and yogurt.

9:00 Went for a jog, took route #2, east on 94th and turning south on Maddison.

9:23 Reached wooded section of Pioneer Park, 3 minutes later than last time route #2 taken.

9:28 Left Wooded section of Pioneer Park

9:56 Returned home, Back door had not been locked during the jog.

10:15 Had to leave. Subject may have noticed me. Judging by reaction, low risk of being uncovered, it's a shame I don't actually know how to do any gardening.

Had Martin been stalking people? Was he some sort of undercover agent? Jacob couldn't imagine that a report would be written in a digital notepad of a computer that never touched fingers with the internet, so that was unlikely. That left.... It was time for bed, there was plenty to work with in his notes from the abandoned manuscripts anyway.

Another rejection email, another half empty bottle of booze on the counter. The newest member of this family of woe was an envelope on the kitchen table, inside which lived a symptom of newfound homeownership: a reminder about his unpaid property tax bill.

Barely scraping by with the meager savings Martin had left behind for him, that was an even less accounted for expense than the fifth of jack. The blinking cursor of a new query letter mocked him from his laptop screen, the document history to the side a painful reminder of the sheer number of times backspace and delete had been utilized. An exasperated sigh led him somehow inexorably out of the kitchen, down the stairs, and staring at a much older screen again, reading. If Martin had been stalking aome girl or cheated on Auntie Maddy, maybe something good could come of it at least. Maybe he could get something to publish.

SEPTEMBER 4th, 1996

The acquisition went smoothly. Maddy knocked her out from behind, it was a clean, almost boring event, no sign of any onlookers since there was convenient parking next to the woods with nothing but empty fields behind. Unless there were any perverts masturbating in the trees, there's no chance anybody saw us.

SEPTEMBER 5th, 1996

The girl is upset. She doesn't understand. She begins to though, her screams have turned to whispers, nobody can hear jack through the basement. It's setting in and we will begin soon.

It got worse from there. Much worse, and Jacob didn't know how many times he had to pause, leave the basement that he would never see the same way again, knowing what the hook in the central support beam had been used for. Going upstairs didn’t help though. His Uncle and Auntie, together in it. They had been the only family who cared about him. Fuck.

Once he finished the story of Elizabeth Morrison, which he had hoped against hope at first was just Martin trying out epistolary fiction but had since found confirmation of her disappearance in scanned newspaper archives from the time, he couldn't stop. The folder was full of so many more files.

    With Elizabeth's story under his belt, the rest came like an avalanche. Bill Marney, Sarah O'Conner, Tabitha Maares. It just went on. Finally, he reached the final entry.

JULY 6th, 2002

That idiot brother of mine kicked Jacob out. Who cares if the boy's a bit fruity? Well, David's loss, I always liked the kid. We're gonna have to clean up the basement of course, get the place up to code and add a window. That's okay, we needed to lie low for a while. A son! We always wanted to start a family. Moving this old bird to the attic now. Time for an upgrade, and it wouldn't do to have the boy find this.

The night crouched still as two men grappled against the door at the bottom of the fresh concrete stairs leading to the basement unit. Struggling to reach into his pocket and around his young new friend, Jacob turned the key in the knob and opened the door. "Shhh," he warned, "my aunt and uncle are upstairs. They're old, but I'd rather not wake them up." He gently pushed the kid off his neck long enough to lead them through the threshold.

"Come on, let's get you in the shower and sober you up a bit. What was your name again?" he asked David, whose name he had known for weeks.

"It doesn't matter does it? Let's go straight to your bed, Daddy." The twink was a little too inexperienced to pull off the sultry pout he was going for.

"No. If I'm going to be your Daddy, you've got to do what I say, right? Now, right that way you'll see the bathroom. Go on, I'll be right behind you." The kid marched away dutifully and Jacob took a minute to calm down from the excitement. He paced around a bit, picking up a crisp new book from the coffee table and fiddling about with it before finally heading to David land the hook now hanging from a support beam in the bathroom of the expanded basement unit.

    The bathroom was well insulated, and the neighbors couldn't hear a thing as Jacob conducted his research for the sequel to the book on the table, "To Never Leave," by Jacob Grouse.