Strange Beginnings

I was conceived in a sprawling stone house with oil pumps in the back yard. In a small east Texas town of less than three hundred people, the house had formerly served as the town mortuary before my parents and siblings moved in. My mother never told my brother that his bedroom was the room in which the prior inhabitants prepared the bodies for burial.

I always found it awkwardly strange and backward that I entered into life in a place where other people usually left it. That's just like me, I always thought. It's like the soul's equivalent of trying to elbow your way up the down escalator.

My parents rented it from the woman who was getting too old to maintain the huge place. (Her son had built it for her.) I wonder if the house still stands, and if I would recognize it if I saw it. I wonder if it's really haunted, or if that's just something my siblings told to scare each other. My eldest sister once said that she saw a ghost float through her room and out the doors to the balcony that adjoined it. I wish that were true--it makes such a great story.