I sat up in bed, tears streaming down my face. It was another second before I wondered what I had been crying about. My gaze traveled around this strange room to see torn wallpaper as the smell of mildew hit my nostrils. I dried my cheeks, doing my best to look around in the early dawn light. It didn’t show much, but it gave a soft outline of a bedroom. I slipped out of bed, the crusty shag carpet reminding me that I was barefoot. I walked over to the window and pulled back the lace curtains before lifting the broken blinds to see nothing but trees. How very odd. Is it odd? I didn’t remember this house, or this view. I also remembered another important detail that maybe I should have considered first.

What was my name?

I stared out the window a few more seconds, wondering if anything out there would help remind me who I was. The trees were unfamiliar, as was the landscape. I walked across the crusty carpet again before hopping back on the bed causing dust to shoot into the air. It was about then that I realized maybe I should panic. But what should I panic about? Maybe that’s exactly what I was supposed to panic about. I woke up sobbing, after all, and I don’t remember why.

First things first, there had to be slippers. Somewhere. I wasn’t sure what was on that shaggy carpet, but I spent enough time tiptoeing on it. I had a high tolerance for gross things, but I did have a limit somewhere. I closed my eyes, thinking, but nothing came. All I knew was I’d rather jump in a dusty bed rather than walk across a carpet with an unknown substance that made it crusty.

The dawn filled this room with a red light, and it was easier to see the sagging high ceiling. That couldn’t be good. It looked like the entire ceiling was painted in a greenish color, dropping down to the walls in uneven strokes before the rest of the wall was in a base white color. There was trash, empty packages, and beer cans scattered all over, with one of the sliding closet doors hanging off the track. Old clothes were stuffed in there. On top of the clustered nightstand was an ash tray with cigarette butts in it. There was a desk with a mountain of papers and other trash, and as enough red dawn light filled the room, I finally acknowledged the old, brown shag carpet. A mouse scampered across the floor into a hole, causing me to stand up on the squeaky, king size bed.

No. I wasn’t afraid of mice. I’d lived with mice before. Was this my house? No. The thought came to me just as quickly. Though I doubted I’d remember if it was, it was a premonition. This was not my house, but I had once lived in a house like this and through it learned not to be afraid of mice.

The nightgown I was wearing wasn’t familiar. Even as I looked at my brown hair, I wondered if I’d been blonde once. I checked my face in the cracked mirror, seeing my smudged makeup, a reminder that I woke up sobbing with no recollection as to why. My hands rested on my hips as I tried to guess how old I was. That, too, fled my mind. Something told me I was past my teenage years. Perhaps twenty-three or twenty-four. Old enough to start taking responsibility, but young enough that no one should expect me to actually be responsible.

That’s how I sensed it, anyway.

It was an old house, judging by the cracks in the ceiling corner. There was a large metal covering running across the top of the ceiling before coming down toward the ground to cover an outlet. This house must have been built before electricity was a thing, and then someone came to add it in later. Sometime in the eighteen hundreds? That sounded right.

I spied the slippers on the other side of the bed, and quickly pulled them on. They were pale pink, like my nightgown. They looked far newer and cleaner than the clothes in my closet. Or, the closet that came with the house that I somehow found myself waking up in.

There were two doors in this bedroom, both with intricate door frames of carved lines and spheres at the corners. The paint was chipping away, which was a pity. I loved old houses.

Oh. Right. I loved old houses.

I walked across the brown carpet with newly protected feet and went to open the door left of the bed. The knob jiggled, but the door was locked. I couldn’t get out that way. Decision made, I tried the door to my right. It squeaked open into a new room. I spied the old TV instantly. It was a huge one, the kind that was made in the nineties. Huge, thick, sagging on an old stand with a bookshelf of VHS’s to the side of it. I walked forward, frowning as I ran my finger over some of the titles.

Alien, The Haunting, Sixth Sense, A Nightmare on Elm Street, The Blair Witch Project, The Exorcist, The Birds.

I stepped away. It was an entire bookshelf covered in old VHS’s of horror movies. I may have amnesia, but the sick feeling in my gut could not lie. I hated horror movies. Hated them. Cozy stories were my preference. Everyone made fun of me because I wouldn’t mind a movie purely about the Shire in Lord of the Rings. Just a cozy story about hobbits making friends and eating food. That was what I wanted.  

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Wait, why did that memory pop into my head? I couldn’t even remember the faces of my friends, just that I knew they made fun of me for it.

I glanced around the rest of the room, rubbing the goosebumps from my arms. It was a small, square room, opened to another equally small, square room that sort of made one large, rectangle room. The brown shag carpet stretched out into both rooms, the ceilings high and cracked. This entertainment room had brown paneling on the wall, so much different from the older, eighteen hundreds feel of the bedroom. This room looked like it had modernized a bit with the electricity, like they’d managed to get outlets in through the wall before they hid it behind the brown paneling. This room felt very seventy and eighties.

Decades. Those were decades. Like eighteen hundreds. Though that was a century. My memory right now was weird.

An old, dusty recliner was in front of the TV, with a love seat and a larger couch behind it. There was a table between the couches that held a candy bowl. Thick, circular bright pink candies rested in there with a stained doily underneath. I reached out to take one, but hesitated. Was this a smart idea? Waking up in a house with no idea who I was? About to take a candy out of a bowl?

I shrugged and snatched one anyway, popping it in my mouth. It was minty.

Grandma. This was a grandma house. Doily, eighties paneling, VHS’s, bright pink mint candy. Ash trays everywhere. I didn’t know any grandma obsessed with horror, but maybe there was. Honestly, I didn’t know a lot of things right now. This amnesia was weird.

I walked along the edge of the couch, sucking on the candy as I explored the room. There was bits of discarded beer cans and ash trays everywhere, with more take out bags that for some reason did not have famous logos on it. I expected the famous arches or even some bag indicating where they got it from the store, but they were empty. That emptiness gave me chills more than the mouse scuttling across the floor.

There were two windows with the same type of stained laced curtains and broken blinds. Dead plants covered both windowsills. It let in dawn light that was still quite red. The wall that separated this small square room from the bedroom had a beautiful built in cherry wood bookshelf that spread across the wall, stopping at the door to the bedroom. The bookshelf was beautiful, but the books were well used and stuffed in every corner it could find. I glanced over the titles.

It, Dracula, I am Legend, The Call of Cthulhu, The Shining.

I’d seen enough. The same feeling of dread filled my gut. This bookshelf would be full of dusty horror books. Looks like I wasn’t getting entertainment from this house.

I moved from the TV room into the next, slightly bigger room. There was an archway leading from the two rooms, giving it an open feel. The brown paneling spread to this room, too. A corner desk held an old computer that I recognized was a nineties computer. The desk was massive, with multiple shelves stuffed with papers and mail. There were stacks of newspapers under the desk, and I tried to see the date on the newspaper. I blinked, seeing the pictures blurred out like the printer made a bad copy. I couldn’t see the date anywhere.

A broken chair stood on what looked like a plastic mat. The computer was off, but plugged in. Was the electricity working? I tried the light switch, and nothing happened. That solved that, unfortunate though it might be.

A rectangular card table stood in the other corner, sagging under the weight of countless numbers of mail letters, partially opened packages, more blurry newspapers, and dirty dishes. I grabbed a letter, trying to find a clue as to who’s house I woke up in, but there was no name on the letter. Neither a sender or receiver. I grabbed a few more letters, but it was all the same. Old letters, but no names written on them. It was so odd. Like the logo-less take out packages and containers and blurry newspapers.

Flies flew around the stack of dirty dishes as I walked to what I assumed was the front door. It had the same beautiful door frame as the bedroom frames, even as the paint was peeling. I grabbed the knob and twisted it, the hinges squeaked as I opened the front door into this forested world. There was a screen door that got caught a bit as I tried to open it. The screen parts were shredded and scratched. They wouldn’t protect against anything.

I walked out on the small slab of cement that was a porch. There was a small porch roof that was chipped and fading, with two poles holding it up. More like one pole, due to what looked like wood rot at the base of the later one. A small wooden bench stood under the window, with multiple dead hanging plants between the poles. The concrete front porch had a dirt path leading toward what looked like a collection of flower beds, all dead. The other path led to what looked like a covered garage with no garage door. More like a covered car port stuffed with junk.

I shaded my eyes and looked toward the sky. There were a lot of trees, but I could still see parts of the sky. There was a hazy feel to everything. I remembered skies like this. It happened most often during forest fires in the summertime, when they were in other states and the wind blew the smoke and ash across the country. It left the sky hazy, making sunrises and sunsets red.

Was there a forest fire? The thought was far more alarming, now that I was in the middle of a forest. I didn’t smell any smoke or fire. The wildlife would be trying to escape, wouldn’t they?

I listened, but it didn’t sound like there was any wildlife. No smell of smoke or fire, which meant I pushed the fear to the back of my mind. Something to remember, but it was perhaps not something to worry about. Figuring out my name seemed top priority, after all. Never mind. Figuring out why I appeared in this strange house with no memories was top priority.

Further away there were large clusters of trees. No one was around, no other people, no other houses. It was like this house sprung up in the middle of the forest. I was alone. Completely alone. I didn’t even know my name.