Jeremy’s Comments (group member since Aug 03, 2016)

Jeremy’s comments from the ScribIntel for Unsung Authors group.

No, thank YOU for starting this! :-)

I hope this isn't too long. This is out of my (mostly) fictional memoir: "Of Knights and Lemon Fights":

The differences between attics and basements go beyond the obvious – it’s more than merely a matter of physical distance and interior design. We’d studied this, my brother and me, this “ology” of other-room science. We had done our research, gathered our information from resources that highlighted each other-room’s significance in the paranormal and the roles each play in matters of time and space, death and life, tragedy and sacredness. We found no serenity in either, only seclusion and a sort of unmitigated mystery, which also happen to be perhaps two of the most drawing factors for pre-teen boys, outside of the promise of finding old forgotten-about coin or baseball card collections.

The typical basement contains within itself the inherent appeal of, and for, all things dead. It’s a tomb. It’s a lost catacomb smoldering with the unseen smoke of spirit material. Home to ghostly exiles and the hidden-away bones of ostracized human deviants who, upon death, had failed to prove neither their heavenly worth to God, nor their hellish worth to Satan. Basement steps scream the laments of lost souls and alert the darkness’s inhabitants – spiders, rats, and the laughter and translucent forms of dead aunts – to the approach of blood-pumping life forms: food. In basements nothing is truly alive, only kept rotting and waiting behind sweating concrete walls, and held as memories in the ceiling’s plaster.

Attics, on the other hand, are the repositories of secrets. Attics of any size, from crawl-throughs to live-ins, are crammed with trapped, relentlessly haunting family riddles, unsolved mysteries long held by generation after generation of secret-keepers, both victims and assailants. They bear the memories of hidden-away children and the clothes of the long-time-dead that hover above the hardwood floors, covering some unseen, unpassed, ethereal caretaker. Attics house the uninhabitable. They store the past, the reminders of long ago questionable, unresolved deaths and inexplicable human injustices, and remind the inhabitants below, the living, of their otherworldly existences with rhythmic midnight floor-knockings and door-slammings and blinding light shining from under those same doors. Attics are the gateways to the unexplained, passageways between here and some sort of “there.” Attics bask in their possessions: here, the trunk in the corner full of old photographs with missing heads, or, over there, the yellowed and blood speckled rabbit-fur pea coat, or, underfoot, the rectangular Persian rug so adept at hiding the engraved pentagram compassed about with hardened circles of candle wax residue – ritualistic forgetfulness and sacrifices to an old ghost-mother of a ghost-mother of a ghost-mother. We loved attics most of all.