I hadn't been down to the cellar since my sixth birthday party.

I hated everything about it.

I hated the smell, thick and noxious, heavy old cedar shavings, rotting PVC piping and wet.

Trapped water that seeped into dark corners and stayed there forever.

The smell filled the place and yet somehow was just an odor after all.

I hated the actual process of going down too.

The stairs creaked, groaned and flexed under any weight at all.

Somehow, they always seemed seconds from collapsing entirely, folding in and themselves

expertly, like how my grandfather shoveled a deck of cards when we played Go Fish.

And the light.

Jesus the light.

It was a singular bulb.

One.

Pastel yellow, flickering inhumanly and too bright in the center, glowing, beaming,

there as if that light held the center of the whole universe,

the infinite expanses of time and space, and whatever else was beyond the

eight planets that we learned about in school a few weeks prior.

The light hung suitably from a thin chain and it swung with the steps. The whole cellar seemed to move, in fact, impossibly intertwined, connected at the joint somehow.

It was a terrifying sight moving down the stairs into the waiting dark, the distant corners

just out of vision, undefined, never fully filled by the unholy orange light that cast

strange shadows against a

rusted metal shelving that had once so lovingly been put in place by the previous

...