The First House
I remember a duplex. Main Street. Somerset, PA. I was five. My brothers, Curt and Mark, high school age. My family had sold our farm. We were moving to another town far away. The duplex was a pitstop in our journey.
I liked it there. We were part of a sea of houses and all kinds of people walked past on the sidewalk. Strollers. Dogs. Cigarettes in mouths. Circles of orange fire after dark.
It was a sunny house. Wood floors got hot under windows. A long, curved banister led upstairs. My brothers slid down the spine of a dinosaur on their bellies while I stood in a dim hallway and waited for the kitchen door to tremble a warning that Mom was coming.
Two people lived on the other side of our walls. They spoke beautifully. Played opera music in the evenings. Always the smell of Mrs. Casio’s tomato sauce. She wore floral, cottony dresses with black shoes, black stockings with straight lines that ran up the back of her legs. Mr. Casio mostly sat on the front porch and read books. He had a brown sweater vest with orange buttons and a cane with a shiny brass dog on top.
Wild cats lived in the back yard. One scratched my face once. Mrs. Casio would appear on her back porch when I tried to pet them, lean over the railing. Virginia. The kitties. Wild. Come here. Cook! She’d shake a navy tin with pink flowers in the air. Archway Sugar Cookies. I’d run over. Reach up on tiptoes. Grab one. Take two more.
Curt owned a record player I wasn’t allowed to touch. He was always fussing with the needle, blowing away invisible dust. He played a song about wanting to hold your hand over and over. Dad said. I’m not crazy about that group. They holler a lot.
I wanted to be like my big brothers, so I let the song grow on me. Hand, hand, hand, hand echoed from every corner of our place on Main. For a time, I kept asking my brothers if they wanted to hold my hand before they put a stop to that. God no!
There were men on the album cover. Just their heads. Mom wanted to cut their hair. Their hair looked fine, but none of them smiled and worst of all, half of their faces missing. Cut off. Shadowed. Blacked out. Erased. Gone.
I know now that was the first time I felt true worry. Could something happen to make my family look like that? Four Beatles. Five of us. And now only Curt and me, and too many shadows.
• • •
Virginia Watts is the author of poetry and stories found in The MacGuffin, Epiphany, CRAFT, The Florida Review, Reed Magazine, Pithead Chapel, Eclectica Magazine among others. She has been nominated four times for a Pushcart Prize. Her debut short story collection Echoes from the Hocker House was a category finalist in the 2024 Eric Hoffer Book Awards, selected as one of the Best Indie Books of 2023 by Kirkus Book Reviews, and won third place in the 2024 Feathered Quill Book Awards. Please visit her at https://virginiawatts.com/.