Come Back Home.

My mother is dead.

Dead people can't hurt you.

I keep telling myself this.

Yesterday, I arrived back in my home state of Oregon. Early this morning I drove from Portland back to my hometown.

I'm from a small town - one of the many fishing and logging towns on the gray coast. Towns that grew like ripe fruit, healthy and strong from the surplus of jobs and profits reaped from the beautiful surroundings. Eventually, when the fish were hunted to the brink of extinction and the logging industry was cut down at its base by new legislation, those towns rotted.  Everything was still there, from the schools, roads and businesses to the people who'd flocked there for a good job and the chance to raise a family. Only now, with the money and main industries gone, all those things shriveled, dead on the vine.

When I was ten, my parents divorced. I spent half my time with each parent, trading off every week. I basically had two houses, but I never stayed in one place long enough to feel like I had a "home." Neither parent was meant to have a child, and this was apparent in their treatment of me. After their divorce, each parent made their best attempt at pretending that nothing had ever happened.

My father was in-and-out of work constantly, and never held any one job long enough to settle down. Eventually, I think he just couldn't take it, and after school one Friday when he was supposed to pick me up, he wasn't there. I never saw him after that.

I spent the rest of my time there with my mother, who hated the responsibility of having me there. Unlike my father, she had a job and could afford to buy a small manufactured home near the lake that she loved. That house was her baby, set up just the way she'd always planned it. I wasn't part of that plan.

I slept in the "guest bedroom" and kept my clothes in a suitcase. I wasn't allowed to listen to music that could be heard outside the room or watch movies after dark. She had always been adamantly against having cable.  Things in the house had to be set back to exactly where they belonged as if I'd never touched them. On multiple occasions, when she'd had friends over, I'd been locked in my room told to never make a noise, or sent outside to the garden shed without lights or power so that her friends wouldn't have to "put up" with me.

As soon as I turned eighteen, I got the fuck out of there and never looked back.

Then last week, I found out that she'd died.

That's why I'm back. My uncle was the one who wrote to let me know. He encouraged me to come to the funeral and, he said, to collect something that was in her will. I still don't know what it is. She made it clear to me more than once that I wasn't going to get anything when she "keeled over."

The funeral isn't until next week, but I felt compelled to stay in my hometown for a while. For a long time it felt like I'd never be welcome back. It's weird, seeing how little the town has changed. All the same little shops and stores are in all the same places. At the grocery store, I saw a few people that I went to school with. Things here seem like they haven't changed at all, they've just gotten older.

My uncle owns my mother's house now. He hasn't decided if he'd rather sell it outright or rent it out as a summer home. He told me that I'm allowed to stay there as long as I'm in town. It kind of made me wonder why we weren't closer while I was living here.

After the sun went down, I drove out to her house for the first time since coming back. The feeling of driving was so strange after being gone for so long. I felt like I still remembered every corner and sign and bump in the road from before I'd left, like I'd only been gone for a weekend instead of five years.

I got to the house and pulled into the gravel driveway. Headlights illuminated the prim garden, wooden privacy fence and the brick red and white house. I left immediately.

I was so filled with anger and sadness at being back in that place that I almost couldn't stand it. I drove to the nearest grocery store and bought two six-packs of beer and a bunch of junk food.

I drank one beer in the parking lot before driving back, and another in the driveway before getting out of the car. I opened the fence, averting my eyes from the tool shed and without questioning it, took the key from the hiding place on the porch and opened the door to go inside.

The house was exactly as I'd last left it. I knew it would be. Everything in its place. I put away my food in the empty fridge and pulled out my laptop. The internet was still up. I went into the guest room and set up up on the desk there. I almost closed the door... five years ago I would have had to, but I thought better of it and left it open. No one was left to upset now...

I spent a few hours alternating between Netflix and Reddit, finished the six-pack and ate half the junk food before I felt my eyes begin sagging.

From the living room, I thought I heard the high-pitched whine that the tube TV made when it was turned on. A couple of seconds later, the hiss of static gradually met my ears. I could see the faint light from the TV shining down the hallway.

My heart was already pounding in my chest, but I had to go over and see what was going on. Trying not to make any noise, I got up and went into the hall. I could see the TV now, the screen a million bouncing points of light. I crept toward the living room, and right before I entered it, I saw her there. My mother. Sitting on the couch I could make out her shoulders and the back of her head.

The strength went out of my legs and my chest froze, unable to even pull in a breath. I couldn't look away. I couldn't believe what I was seeing, but no lack of belief would make it disappear. It seemed that reality itself was broken.

"No!" I tried to shout, but only a faint sound came out. The static on the television, the only source of light in the room, began to pulse in rhythm, as if the sound had fallen into it like a rock into a pond. Each ripple dropped the room into almost total darkness, and the sound of the static seemed to come from all around me.

I turned back, to try to escape down the hall, but the instant I looked back, all the doors slammed shut. I looked back to the living room and I saw my mother start to turn her head to look at me. The light from the TV faded to a single point, as if someone had turned it off. Then darkness.

The sound increased to a deafening roar, like a waterfall. It increased until I thought my ear drums might rupture, then immediately, as if it had been muted, it stopped.

In that small moment of silence, a young female voice from the darkness right behind me whispered, "Unwanted."

The sound erupted forth again, and the lights that I'd left on earlier came back blindingly bright. The television exploded, and a  huge torrent of water burst forth into the middle of the living room, full of fish and lily pads and other leaves and debris.

I sprinted for the front door, slipping across the wet carpet, ran down the steps and into my car.

I'm writing this from my phone in a hotel room. I've got no idea what the fuck that was or what to do. All I know right now, is that I can't go back to that house.

I've got exactly one piece of comfort right now. And that is that my mother is dead.

Dead people can't hurt you.

I keep telling myself this.