Tell-Tale Attic

There is something living in my attic. I’ve not personally met the squatter, but we’ve communicated through bumps, flutters, and (in my case) shrieks. The tale of the attic begins as a frustrating one. When our house was built seven years ago the team installing the AC/heating unit did a *less than stellar* job. The result is heat suddenly turning on in the middle of the night during the summer and heat refusing to stay on during the winter. We’ve had it looked at, but that’s another story altogether involving beards, wiring, and throwing coins into wishing wells. All of these things lead to having to go up into the attic to flip the switch in order for the heat to come back on.

Attics just teem with ideas of creatures lurking in the corners or other unwanted beings wandering around up there in the dead of night. They hold their own mystery and intrigue. When you couple those traditional, and completely warranted, ideals with a writer, you get a significantly more dramatic version. Logically I’m aware of the fact that Sasquatch doesn't live in my area. (The Chupacabra, on the other hand, are still out there.) Logically I know that the space is so small I would see if someone, say a wandering traveler with malice in his (or her) crazy, messed up heart, decided to camp out up there. They would fall through the ceiling…logically.  The thing about logic is that it tends to falter in the dark, or during extended times of solitude. What might be a trapped bird fluttering around up there while the family gathers around the fireplace with great American novels in their hands, becomes a demon spawn of the underworld as I sit down, alone, to write the next great American novel. Don’t even get me started on what it turns into during the night.

I’ll leave you with this final thought: someday, it’s going to happen. I’m going to pull those stairs down, make my way up there, and something is going to happen. I have a hundred ideas spinning around in my mind as to what it’s going to be, but until it happens, those stories will live and grow until I’m forced to put them into my computer where they will turn into an adventure for some unsuspecting character. I guess what it all comes down to is that every writer needs an attic.