We pulled up to the curb in our cruddy, silver minivan. I peered out the window and groaned. I was about to spend the entire afternoon with my least favorite relative, my aunt, Helen.
Aunt Helen had always been kind of strange, but in recent years, she had gotten more and more bizarre. Instead of attending family functions, she holed up in her bedraggled suburban home and moped. She always sent gifts during the holidays, though, so I guess she wasn't a total hermit. They were never good gifts, but at least she tried.
“Now, you be nice to her!” Mom scolded, wagging her finger at me. “This is very hard for Aunt Helen! You know how depressed she's been since she and Kristy had it out.”
I rolled my eyes. No seventeen-year-old wanted to spend their Saturday afternoon cleaning up their crazy aunt's junk.
“Don't you roll your eyes at me, young man! How would you feel if the city walked into your room and said they were kicking you out because you didn't pick up your dirty clothes?”
“Yeah, Mom, because waiting a few days to put jeans in the hamper is comparable to saving fourteen-year-old milk,” I muttered, crossing my arms.
She gave me a dirty look as she unbuckled her seat-belt.
“Do not bring that up to her,” she hissed. “She's embarrassed enough as it is.”
“Why can't she just be normal like Aunt Madelyn and Uncle Bart? Was she dropped on her head or something?” I asked, irately. Sniffing the air, I added, “God, it stinks! I can smell that dump from the curb!”
“Oh stop it,” she muttered. “We've been over all of this before. Aunt Madelyn and Uncle Bart have been your grandfather's favorites since we were kids. Aunt Helen has always felt like she's been stuck in their shadow. Hell, I can't blame her. They make me look a loser.”
She chuckled, nervously. I still refused to unbuckle my seat-belt.
“Well, maybe they make you look like a loser but our house isn't full of rats and moldy food. Hers is.”
She sighed and rubbed her temples.
“Look, let's not make this a fight, Matthew. I have to take your sister to her soccer tournament and I'm already running twenty minutes late so I just really need you to please go do this for me, okay?” she pleaded, clearly frustrated.
“And what do I get out of it?”
She narrowed her eyes.
“Fine. I'll give you a hundred bucks if you make it through the day. That sound fair?”
Moments later, I found myself knocking on the door-frame as my mother's vehicle roared away in the opposite direction. The door was hanging from its hinges, and I feared that even the lightest tap might have been enough to break it down. Puzzled, I tried the doorbell, which, unsurprisingly, did not work.
I waited, awkwardly, rocking back and forth on my heels, whistling aloud to myself. The smell was enough to make me hold my breath until I was blue in the face. I only took in a lungful of oxygen when it was an absolute necessity.
All of a sudden, the door creaked open, trembling on its final hinge as Aunt Helen tugged on the knob. She narrowed her wild, blue eyes and took a drag from her cigarette. I scratched the back of my neck, uncomfortably.
“Your mother said she was dropping you off.”
She blew a cloud of smoke out of the corner of her cracked mouth, flashing me a glimpse of her yellowed, rotting teeth. I made a face. Her breath was as bad as the pungent aroma leaking from the property.
“Yep, I'm here to help,” I replied, trying to grin as widely as I could.
My hands were clammy.
She grunted at me and spluttered, “Great.”
She opened the door a little wider, still staring at me with her bloodshot, bespectacled eyes as she took short drags from her cigarette. Her mousy, brown hair and graying roots were sticking out in every direction and I could only assume she had been wearing the same pink bathrobe and mismatched slippers all week. There were food stains and brown globs of God-knows-what smeared across her front. I had a hard time believing she was younger than Mom and Aunt Madelyn. She sure didn't look it.
After a few moments, she finally snarled, “So are you comin' in or what?”
I shuffled in behind her. The house was unlike anything that I'd ever seen. Piles of trash and expired food lined the walls and once I trudged past the mudroom, it became apparent that her cats had been defecating everywhere. Gagging, I looked over at her.
“Is that cat shit?”
“Watch your mouth, boy,” she grunted, “and yes. Wooly never quite figured out the litter box. He lives here. You don't. Got a problem? Get out of my house.”
I gulped and nodded, although I was still questioning how she had the inability to pick up the gifts that “Wooly” had left around the kitchen. As much as I was trying not to humiliate her, it was proving difficult not to show my disgust.
“S-sorry,” I murmured.
“Damn right you are,” she spat. “Now get to work on the back bedroom! I'll be in the lounge.”
Confusedly, I looked around the small house. There was nowhere to “lounge” from what I could see.
“The one that used to be Kristy's bedroom?”
She gave me a dark, red-eyed glare.
“Don't use that bitch's name in my house.”
And with that, she made a beeline out of the room, stepping over various empty milk cartons and piles of cat feces along the way.
I made a quick mental note not to mention Kristy again.
After almost two hours of collecting trash in what was apparently once a bedroom, I was already getting tired. I was not even halfway finished, but the job was beginning to seem far too big for just myself and Aunt Helen, especially since she was not even helping. I could smell her chain-smoking in the other room, yet every time I knocked on the door to check on her, she barked at me to get back to work.
The worst part about her house was the disturbing number of cats that she kept there. The living conditions were not safe for a human, and they certainly weren't safe for pets. Every time I turned around, one was wrapping itself around my leg, begging for attention. Each and every one of them looked as though they were ill. It was at that point that every bit of annoyance that I felt turned to pure rage. How dare she bring innocent animals into her insanity?
“I'm sorry, little guy,” I muttered, patting a tabby on the head. “Hopefully this whole thing will get you some help.”
He mewed at me, his eye dripping a greenish fluid with each jerk of his head.
Suddenly, the was a pounding on the wall.
“You don't sound like you're workin' in there!”
I groaned and gave the tabby cat one last pat on the head. He was purring, almost like he had not felt any affection in months. Considering the one thing she supposedly cared about were her cats, I could only imagine the state of the rest of her house.
“Sorry, I was petting one of your cats,” I shouted back through the wall. “How are you coming along in there? Getting some stuff clean?” The only response that I received was the thick aroma of yet another freshly-lit cigarette.
Time flew by and the room slowly improved. Underneath an atrocious number of layers of debris, I'd finally found the worn, musty orange carpet. Sadly, Aunt Helen was still smoking in her supposed lounge. The woman did not even leave to use the bathroom, though I couldn't blame her for that. After I plodded through the house in a horrified attempt to wash my hands of the mildew I'd collected beneath my fingernails, I came to the conclusion that none of the plumbing worked.
“I think I've cleared enough space in here to pass! You want me to move onto one of the other rooms?” I shouted through the wall. “The kitchen maybe? Or your living room?”
I heard a faint snort.
“Fine,” she snapped. “Go fix up the shed!”
With a frown, I peered out the grimy window. There was, indeed, a shed in the backyard, but it hardly looked like it needed the facelift the rest of the house did. My mother had warned me that Aunt Helen might be reluctant.
“No, Aunt Helen,” I argued. “We have to get your house clean—your living space. The city is going to demolish it if we don't. You do get that, right?”
“Let them!” she barked. “My roof! My rules!”
I swallowed my pride and decided not to mention that the roof was so leaky that it was just about as stable as she was. Instead, I took matters into my own hands. If she wanted to sit in her lounge and accomplish nothing, that was fine, but I was going to take care of the kitchen so Mom would finally pick me up. I knew she wouldn't let me go anywhere until the house was up to the city's standards.
“Fine, I'll work on the shed,” I lied, eager to get out of the hellhole. “Why don't you just stay in the lounge and listen to some of your music or something?”
She was silent. I smelled another cigarette.
“Is that a yes?”
“Get back to work, brat!”
While Aunt Helen was under the impression that I was cleaning out the shed, I really had made my way back into the kitchen and as quietly as I could, I started collecting the trash. The room was a sea of expired food, cat feces, and maggot-infested scraps. It was, quite clearly, one of the most dangerous rooms in the house.
I was in the middle of gagging at the sight of a decaying rat when I heard the sounds of a turning doorknob. It sounded like it was coming from Aunt Helen's lounge, and that was when my eyes widened in horror. I knew that as soon as she saw that I was cleaning the kitchen, she was going to lash out.
Terrified, I tried to make my way to the mudroom, but I accidentally elbowed a stack of cookbooks and they tumbled to what was once a floor. My face drained of all color and my mind raced through all of the possible explanations I had for being in the room. The half dozen brimming trash bags were certainly nothing I could justify to her. The woman was demented.
“Matthew!” she scolded from down the hallway. “You better not be throwin' away nothing! I gotta go through that!”
I heard her footsteps and the sound of rubbish shifting with each move she made. My heart was thudding against the walls of my chest, and it was then that I made one last-ditch effort to convince her that I wasn't cleaning. To the right of the pile of bagged trash was her refrigerator. While I doubted it even worked, I figured the open fridge door would be enough to block the evidence of my progress.
“No, of course not, Aunt Helen!” I called back. “I was just—uh—looking for a snack!”
“A snack?” she barked. “You better not be in my fridge!”
Her voice was getting closer.
My heart stopped and instincts told me to release the handle from my grip and to let her see the trash bags instead. Without opening the refrigerator door, I backed away and started looking for an accessible cupboard. There were none.
“No, Aunt Helen!” I shouted back. “I figured maybe you had some—er—chips or something. All that work has made me hungry.”
The wrinkled woman stood at the hallway entrance of the room. She looked much taller than she was, standing on top of the fallen cookbooks.
“Well, alright,” she grunted. “I ain't got any chips but there are some crackers on the counter over there. You clean out that shed?”
I gulped and nodded.
“Y-yes. I just finished, which is why I came in for a snack.”
She averted her harsh gaze to the pile of trash bags on the floor. With a long drag on her cigarette, she gave me a nod.
“It looks like you've gotten some work done in here too. Good job, boy. Just make sure you ain't throwin' out my cookbooks, ya hear?”
Although I was confused, I just nodded and replied, “Yes, of course not. I'd never throw out books. Th-thank you. I've been working hard.”
“And one more thing.”
“Yes?”
“Stay out of my fridge. You can have some of those crackers if ya want. Just leave some for me, 'kay?”
“Th-thanks.”
She trudged back to her lounge and I let out a sigh of relief.
Realizing I actually was hungry, I struggled through the trash to the other end of the kitchen and seized the box of crackers that she had mentioned. Unfortunately, when I opened them, I noticed that they were covered in maggots. I made a face. So much for a snack.
“How are them crackers, nephew?” I heard her shout from the lounge. “They're them rosemary garlic ones! Should be real good!”
“They're delicious, Aunt Helen!” I lied. “Truly delicious!”
Perhaps, it wasn't really a lie. The maggots seemed to think they were tasty.
Nearly three hours later, the kitchen still wasn't habitable. The sour scent of the air was not interrupted by Aunt Helen's stale cigarette smoke, so I figured that she had probably fallen asleep in her lounge.
As I swept up a pile of cat feces, curiosity began to get the best of me. The rusty, mold-riddled refrigerator was only a few feet away, emanating the odor of rotting meat. It were almost as though it were beckoning me to open it. Whatever was in there, it was something that Aunt Helen didn't want me seeing. Considering she was comfortable with me seeing the rest of her odious abode, it had to be something quite extreme.
Quietly, I stepped over the pile of cat feces and made my way to the hallway. My heart was pounding, but I had to make sure that she was not coming out any time soon.
“Aunt Helen?” I hissed towards the lounge door. “Aunt Helen!”
No answer.
I gulped and called for her again.
“Aunt Helen?”
I could hear the faint sound of the Wilburn Sisters, an obscure group from the forties that my aunt admired nearly as much as she admired her many cats. She was comfortable, and she likely was not going anywhere.
Tiptoeing back to the kitchen, broom in hand, I approached the refrigerator. It seemed much larger than it was when I first saw it earlier in the day. The appliance had been taunting me ever since Aunt Helen told me not to open it. Her demands only made me want to open it all the more. What did she expect? She was the one that trusted a teenager to freely wander around her death trap of a house.
Though my hand was trembling, it was only getting closer to the handle. Shaking, my sweaty fingers curled around the handle. My eyes flickered back towards the hallway. The Wilburn Sisters' Handsome Scotty was still playing on the radio. With a gulp, I instinctively closed my eyes and pulled the refrigerator door.
Something smelled absolutely repugnant—unbearably so. With a deep breath, I opened my eyes, and what I saw mortified me.
The shelves were not lined with old food like I had expected. Instead, corpses of cats long lost were stacked from top-to-bottom, just like a more sane person may stack their groceries. I keeled over and vomit erupted from the depths of my stomach. My bloodshot eyes darted back to the open refrigerator as I wiped my mouth with my sleeve. Shutting the door seemed like the most obvious option, but I was awestruck. With my jaw on the floor, I gazed over the sheer number of their tiny, furry dead bodies. Some were rotted more than others. Some were completely flattened, as though some of the garbage in the house had collapsed on top of them. The grim sight was unlike anything I had ever seen.
“See something you want to talk to me about?”
I jumped and quickly closed the refrigerator. Aunt Helen's voice was like nails on a chalkboard.
“I-I—no!” I stammered, my cheeks reddening. “I just—I was just—”
“You were just what?” she hissed, wrath laced in her tone. Barefoot, she stepped right onto the pile of cat feces and growled, “Just snooping?”
“I-I think I should call my mom,” I stuttered, backing away. “L-look, Aunt Helen, I d-didn't see anything—”
“Didn't see anything, eh?” she growled, taking another step towards me. “You just opened the fridge for the fun of it? Didn't look inside? Is that it?”
She backed me right into the mountain of garbage bags that I had collected. The hell house had trapped me in there with her. With my heart pounding rapidly, I held my hands in front of my face.
“I didn't see anything, I swear!”
Aunt Helen sucked on her teeth and seized a kitchen knife from the messy counter.
“I don't like liars, boy,” she grunted, shaking the butcher's knife in front of my nose. Suddenly, a car horn honked right outside the house. Aunt Helen furrowed her brow, but something caught her eye and she quickly hid the knife behind her back. There was a knock on the door-frame.
“Helen?” a sickly-sweet voice called. “Ben? Can I come in? Is it safe?”
“Yeah, yeah, he'll be there in a sec,” Aunt Helen grumbled. She then looked me in the eye and hissed, “You tell anyone about this, and you'll be in my fridge too, boy.”
I gulped.
“Y-yes, Aunt Helen.”
“Good. Now get the hell out of my house.”
I scrambled out from between her and the mountain of trash and made a beeline for the door. After nearly pulling it off the hinges, I embraced my mother like I had never embraced her before.
“O-oh! It's nice to see you too,” she said, surprised. “Did you tell Aunt Helen thanks for having you? Uck! Matthew! You got me all grimy!”
She made a face and wiped off the front of her blouse.
“Oh, it was no problem. He actually got a lot of work done.”
I jumped. I hadn't known Aunt Helen was standing right behind the screen door. Getting as far away as possible from that wretched woman was at the top of my to-do list.
“I'm glad he was able to help,” Mom gushed. “I hope he was no trouble?”
Aunt Helen pursed her lips.
“No trouble at all.”
Tugging on my mother's hand, I muttered, “Well, it's getting late. We better be getting home, Mom.”
She furrowed her brow, confused why I was being so pushy. Nevertheless, she agreed.
“You're right. Thank you again, Helen.”
She turned on her heel and followed me to the minivan. I was moving as fast as my legs could carry me. As soon as I got to the vehicle, I opened the door and locked myself inside. My mother unlocked it again, slid in the driver's seat, and furrowed her brow.
“You seemed like you were in quite a rush to get out of there,” she noted, buckling her seat-belt. “Was it really that bad?”
I gulped, my eyes fixated on Aunt Helen's silhouette. She was still standing just behind the screen door. All of those dead cats were less than a hundred feet away. The thought sent a shiver down my spine.
“Just uh, just a lot of trash. It was still pretty filthy when I left but I worked all day and she just sat in her lounge,” I muttered. “I can't go back there, though. It uh, it was making me really sick. I puked just before you showed up.”
Mom pulled away from the curb, a puzzled expression on her face.
“I was afraid of that,” she admitted with a sigh. “Well, you can't help that she wasn't willing to help you. Remind me to get that hundred-dollar bill when we get home.”
I nodded, although I was hardly concerned about the money. My eyes were still fixated on the dilapidated house in the right mirror.
“You okay?”
My mother's voice forced me to snap back to reality.
“Uh...yeah. I think I'm alright.”
We sat in silence for another moment.
“Aunt Helen's house smells funny!” my little sister chimed in from the backseat.
“You don't even know the half of it,” I grumbled. “Hey, can we listen to some music?”
Mom looked concerned, but she nodded and I turned on the radio. I continuously pressed the seek button until I finally found a radio station that I actually liked. She glanced at me from the corner of her eye.
“You sure you're okay?”
“I'm sure.”
No matter what words came from my mouth, I knew that the corpses of those cats would live in my nightmares forevermore. The worst part was that I could tell no one, for if I did, Aunt Helen would surely kill me too.