My grandfather’s basement was always flooded, knee-deep greyish green water that stank of rot and sewage. The lights didn’t work down there. Sometimes I would look down the steps, terrified and fascinated, at the decaying bowels of his ugly, dilapidated house. Sometimes when I shone my flashlight on the water I swore I could see it moving.

When the house burnt down the remnants of it were all shoved down into the gaping hole of the basement, leveled flat. Nothing exists there anymore but the plot of land, overgrown with sickly grass and bent saplings.