Juvia had stared for over twenty minutes at the jumble of a house, thinking about the letters, and how her grandfather never discontinued sending them. How he had written them to the point of his death. She took in every detail of the outside of the house, every rotten board, every dead bush and flower, all of it. Finally, she decided that it was time to go inside. She felt silly standing there, the neighbors must have been watching curiously at the new owner of the “Crazy Old Man's” house. Juvia looked towards all the adjacent houses, searching for a swaying curtain or for any signs of prying eyes, but she found that the houses were all boarded up, no sign of human life near them for what must have been years.  

“It figures. No one wanted to live near the him I guess.” Juvia said to herself. The feeling of loneliness that her grandfather must’ve felt quickly washed over her for a moment, and was then gone as soon as it came. Suddenly she felt bad for not reading those letters. She was the only one he could talk to. She sighed and shook her thoughts away as she lifted her bags to bring to the porch. She reached for the gate, and with only one touch of her fingertips it broke off its hinges and fell flat on the ground.  

“Okay. No more gate.” She said through gritted teeth, continuing her march up to the porch. “At least it’s not dad’s basement.” She tried the doorknob. It was locked, as it should’ve been. She reached into her backpack aggravatedly and dug furiously for the keys. She cursed a few times before she found them, even though they shouldn’t have been very hard to find. They were old medieval type keys, painted streaky dark brown. The paint on them was chipping, and the metal underneath was rusty.

The door opened easily enough with a good shove. She looked down as she walked through the entrance, expecting exactly what she had seen in the pictures—a messed up, old, rickety, house that needed to be cleaned and most likely fumigated.

Looking up, it was like the oxygen around her became instantaneously locked out of her lungs.

To be continued...