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//Author’s Notes: Written in 2023.
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You’re looking up at your shower head, wondering whether or not changing the bathroom up is worth the time and money for when you sell this place.
You head downstairs and into your office, and open that real estate website to look up the current estimate.
You open a tab for plumbing estimates, another for “do-it-for-you” contractors, not even sure what to look up.
You go back to the real estate tab, and nostalgia hits you for when you clicked through on this place originally.
You open the gallery full screen. The living room, bare. New. Blank. Ditto the rest of the house. The roomy kitchen, the extra pantry storage.
Then the pictures from the prior owners that convinced you to move in.
What was clearly a pre-teen child’s room upstairs.
The room that was going to be a guest room before you had to convert it to a nursery contained a huge train set before you bought the place.
You emulated their layout for the main bedroom, looking up that photo to remember how they oriented their chair to the bed.
There’s the living room with the tiny rug and your old couch.
Then the.
New. Couch.
You never gave these photos to any company or website.
…
You didn’t take these photos.
The next one is inside the back patio. The pumpkin garland is across the back door.
Then your back gate. You recognize the black smoke in the background. This spring was the only time you burned the portobellos that badly.
The photo of “Convenient walkways!” has your pregnant wife and your toddler in the background, walking to the lake.
The high-res panoramic of said water feature is centered on them sitting on a bench.
The next one is fairly recent. In the living room, office door open, penguin potty nearby.
Except the pack-n-play isn’t in the picture. You only moved that before you went to take a shower.
Then you look up.

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//Author’s Notes: My hair is still damp from the shower where I had the idea of this. This is a super rough draft, but I hope you enjoyed it.
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//Author’s Notes, II: Two weeks later, I like this a lot. My first effort could have been better but I’m satisfied with how it came out. I kind of want to edit it, I know how it could be stronger already, but I also want to keep it as a sort of meditation on writing it quickly.
Maybe I’m being pretentious about it. I could see taking that idea and making it a way creepier story in all sorts of fun ways, which might be more rewarding than trying to edit a “here’s this idea’s framework” kind of story idea.
Writing about writing, thinking about thinking. This is me.
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