rosevelyn's estate sale
Oct. 15th, 2025 12:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
f0rrestFor a few autumn months there during the COVID-19 pandemic, I drove a 1998 Volvo V70 GLT.
It reminded me of a boxy silver caterpillar. It was all segmented and rode real close to the ground. It had elongated rear lights composed of several smaller square lights, like a pair of compound eyes. It also had cat-like features. Its front-facing car face was a cat face. It had big feline headlights squinted on either side of an oversized grille reminiscent of the mesh of a wet cat nose. Below the grille was a slightly curved line of black open space, like a neutral but satisfied feline expression, as if it had just filled itself on treats and nip or something. The back hatch opened to a significant amount of storage space. It had that distinct nineties car smell, the kind of smell that, due to the breakdown of dead animal matter, only gets stronger as time passes. You could practically see the warm musty leather smell billowing out in thick golden-brown clouds whenever you opened the doors. The front dash was all analog, with little plastic lines arcing back and forth for fuel usage and miles per hour. The clock had numbers made of those small green rectangles you see on ancient digital alarm clocks. There was no CD player, only radio and cassette, so I bought one of those cassette-to-AUX adapters to play music with my phone, and I'm still mystified as to how that actually works. Pushing down the gas pedal produced acceleration akin to a small fart that got louder the longer you held your foot down. It had no cup holders, so I had to order some cheap plastic inserts that fit between the seats. The brakes were flat-out dangerous. It ate batteries like they were Tic Tacs or something, which ended up costing me a small fortune. And I'm sure it failed all modern-day carbon emission tests. But the car was undeniably cool and retro.
I didn't drive the Volvo for long though, mostly because it seriously broke down only a few months after I got it, but also because it depressed the living hell out of me, because the car wasn't just undeniably cool and retro, it was also haunted.
Every now and then, as far back as I can remember, during the Thanksgiving-Christmas months, my father would take me to my grandma’s house up in Watkinsville, Georgia, to check in on old Rosevelyn. She lived alone in this three-story burgundy brick house on a hill off a side road miles outside of town. The house was photographic. Virginia Creeper crept along the walls, and fuzzy green moss grew between every brick. I imagined the house itself was averse to change, like an inert brick giant standing steadfast and tall against the tides of time, showing faint signs of age but still holding strong. The driveway ran beside a retaining wall that held back a raised lawn, leading to a basement garage that felt almost underground. You had to walk up loose brick steps to even get to her front yard, which looked down on the driveway from the brick wall, the top of which was covered in thick grass. As a child, I would T-pose myself perilously on the top of the wall, descend its elevation all the way to the end and back, and as a teenager, I would sit on the wall, legs dangling, Nokia phone in one hand, texting my girlfriend about how bored I was, and as an adult, I would stand atop the wall, pining nostalgically about how I used to do all those things. But from that high perch, regardless of era, one thing remained constant, Rosevelyn’s 1998 Volvo V70 GLT, parked in the shade of the towering oaks.
Rosevelyn had a driver’s license but hated driving, so from visit to visit, until I was like thirty years old, the Volvo never moved. It was always in that same spot, right up until her death.
The inside of the house was static. It was large but felt somehow small. The front door had a knob right in the middle, and the knob itself was surrounded by ornate gold trim, making it awkward to twist. The door opened to a large room with antique couches and a grand piano. It was more of a parlor, really. The room was sunken somewhat, with steps on either end, and it was long, so as a child I would run back and forth, sometimes stopping to play simple melodies on the piano. The parlor connected to both the living room and the kitchen, themselves connected without walls or doors between them. The living room was cramped, with an antique couch and some musty love seats and a television set all behind a standing screen, and there was a large sliding glass door on the far end that opened to a steep backyard that was unkempt and dotted with oaks. There was only one lamp in the living room, and despite the glass door being uncovered, it was somehow always dark orange and gloomy in there. A number of tables and shelves lined the walls, atop which were family photos and dusty tomes and knickknacks, particularly Hummels, of which she had hundreds, everywhere, some set up in little scenes behind an ornate glass cabinet. Angelic porcelain children laughing, tossing balls, and playing little flutes. There was a desk in the corner, near the entrance to the kitchen, where an old typewriter sat, surrounded by letters, stamps, and fountain pens. She seemed to be an avid writer but produced no notable works and never talked about it. As a young woman, she was a real estate agent, and, when she got much older, started working for my dad’s real estate company, but as far as I could tell, she didn’t do any actual work, although by her desk, there was an old wooden sign with CALL ROSEVELYN HARRISON 760-6231 in bright red font. That number connects to a dead line now. I imagine the sign was probably staked in a plot of land somewhere long ago, but by the time I was like ten, it had become just another relic of her past. There were little historical relics like this all over her house. The kitchen was full of them. The cabinets were filled with ancient tableware. Dishes and plates and bowls with all sorts of ornate trim and images imprinted on them, images in that distinct 50s-style Americana artwork with rosy-cheeked children with big dimples that looked both photorealistic and incredibly uncanny. These things held special sentimental value to her for some reason. The kitchen window stool was decorated with Santas and elves from bygone Christmases. There was no dishwasher, everything was done by hand. The kitchen sink was sunk into the counter and made from vitreous china. The silverware might have been actual silver. Some sort of elaborately patterned red cloth draped every surface. The pantry was full of years-old Little Debbie Oatmeal Cream Pies that she would offer me whenever I visited, regardless of my age, and they tasted great. I grew to love Oatmeal Cream Pies. Beyond the living room was a long hallway that connected to all three bedrooms in the home. There were no televisions in these bedrooms, only antique lamps with ornate shades and big mirrors and nightstands on which King James sat. My father’s old childhood bedroom had been turned into a guest room, but remnants of his youth remained. Baseball cards, sports memorabilia, an ancient radio boombox, loose cassettes from the 70s and 80s, and even some of his old clothing deep in the walk-in closet. I got the impression she kept these things as a reminder. That’s probably why the interior of the home hadn’t changed in decades. Maybe the permanence helped her in some way, made her less lonely. Maybe she thought if she just left things the way they were, she would never forget the past, never forget who she was, never forget what she did. Right outside my dad’s old bedroom was a big wooden door to the basement. As a child, looking down from the top of the long stairwell, it was like staring down into a monster’s den, so I never went down there. As a teenager, it was mysterious and alluring, so I would work up the nerve to creep down the creaky wooden steps, but when I got to the very bottom, I would get spooked due to the lack of light and quickly climb back upstairs, feeling as if a ghost was on my back the whole time. As an adult, I would stare down that dark stairwell and see nothing but an existential void. At least that’s how it felt the last time I was there, at the estate sale.
Sometime in October 2020, I was in my office playing video games, and I received a call from my dad. He usually started every call with some comment about how I hadn’t called him in months, but this time, in a solemn tone, all he said was my name. Forrest.
I thought maybe he was joking around, so I said, “Dad.”
“Your grandma’s in the hospital.”
“Is she OK? What happened?”
“She fell down the basement stairs.”
“Is she OK?”
There was a weird silence. I couldn’t even hear the normal background static, like he had covered the phone’s microphone with his hand or something.
“Is she OK?”
“I hadn’t heard from her in almost a week.”
“What do you mean?”
“She fell down the stairs, Forrest.”
“I know, you said that.”
“She was down there for days.”
Something happened with my stomach, like a phantom had reached through my flesh and twisted at my insides or something. Some horrible revelation reached my body before it had reached my mind, and when my mind caught up, I stared off into the wall, wide-eyed and speechless.
“She was down there for days, Forrest.”
“I… I heard you.”
“I drove down there. To her house. To check on her. The Volvo was still there. All the doors were locked.”
“How did you get in?”
“I went to the basement door, the one by the garage.”
There was another long pause. This time I heard something like a forced cough. When my dad returned, his voice was shaking.
“I looked through the window, the one on the door,” he said, pausing again.
“OK, what did you see? What happened?”
“It was dark, Forrest. I didn’t see anything. But it felt weird. Something was off. I got this feeling in my stomach, you know the one. And I don’t know what I was thinking, but I punched through the glass, cut my hand all up.”
“Are you OK?”
“That doesn’t matter.”
“...”
“I punched through, unlocked the door from the inside, let myself in. Then, first thing I did was, I went to the stairwell to go upstairs. It was dark. I had trouble finding the light switch, but I knew it was at the bottom of the stairwell.”
“Dad.”
“When I turned the light on,” he said, pausing.
“It’s OK, Dad. I don’t need to know.”
A long silence followed this leg of the conversation. I didn’t know what to say. I thought about Rosevelyn tumbling down the dark stairwell, alone, landing on the hard concrete floor, not being able to move, just lying there, maybe a broken leg or a broken hip. I didn’t want to know. Why was she going down there to begin with? What was she thinking? I thought about her just lying there, her body twisted and mangled, screaming out for help, no food or water, writhing in pain, for days. The thought of it made me sick. I started feeling terrible for having not spent much time with her. I never called her. I never sent cards. I never wished her a happy birthday. Nothing. When I was a kid, I thought she was boring. When I was a teen, I thought she was boring. When I was an adult, I told myself I was just too busy, too busy to care. And then I started feeling bad for feeling bad, like how selfish am I just thinking about myself here when she was the one down there writhing in pain at the bottom of a dark stairwell for days. And I couldn’t even imagine how my father was feeling. I had never lost a parent before. I didn’t know what it was like. There was no way for me to empathize. I didn’t know what the hell to say to him. There were no words. I started wondering what was going through Rosevelyn’s head when she was down there on the concrete. I wondered if her life had flashed before her eyes, like they say. I wondered if she had thought about me, how I never called, how I never seemed to care. I wondered if she had cursed me in her mind. And then I started feeling bad about making this all about me again, and then I started feeling really bad because I had started thinking about her Volvo. My car was a wreck. I needed a new car. I wondered if I could maybe have her Volvo. I don’t know why I thought this, but I did, and it made me feel really bad. It made me feel so bad that I closed my eyes shut for what felt like ten minutes. I breathed in, breathed out. I tried to stop myself from thinking about myself. Then I started thinking if she had been angry down there, angry that after 84 years it had to end this way, alone at the bottom of a stairwell. She was a Christian woman. I knew that. But I wondered if, maybe, down there on the hard concrete, I wondered if maybe she had been angry with God for doing this to her. Or maybe not. Maybe she was faithful until the very end. Maybe this was all part of God’s plan, maybe that’s what she had thought down there while she was splayed out, unable to move, on the hard concrete, in total darkness. I don’t know. Maybe on the way down, maybe she just hit her head, passed out. Maybe she just dreamed a pleasant dream the whole time. Maybe her mind went into self-preservation mode, flipped off her consciousness, flooded her body with endorphins, put her to sleep, made her dream a pleasant dream. Maybe she dreamed of my father as a young boy. Maybe her death came so swiftly that she didn’t even know it was happening to begin with. I stopped thinking about the Volvo. I started thinking that maybe she hadn’t felt any pain, and this thought made me feel a little better, until I remembered what my dad had said about Rosevelyn being in the hospital.
I’m not sure how much time had passed since we last said a word to each other, but when I broke the silence, I said, “How’s she doing, you know, in the hospital?”
“She’s in a coma.”
“How quickly did it, you know, happen?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, was she conscious the whole time, or did she, you know, did she pass out?”
“I don’t know.”
“What about the doctors? What are they saying?”
“They don’t know either.”
There was another silence, shorter this time.
“I want you to come down in three weeks,” my dad said, his voice lower than before.
“To see her, in the hospital?”
“No, for the funeral.”
“But she’s alive, I thought.”
“She is.”
“...”
“I don’t know, Forrest.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know?”
“I just don’t know, son.”
“Tell me, Dad.”
“I have to go now.”
“Wait.”
“I’ll send you the date.”
And then the line went dead.
My father gave a speech at the funeral. I recited a poem. I don’t remember the details all that well. It was an open casket. Rosevelyn was on display for everyone to see. But she wasn’t herself. Her face was weird, waxy, made up. Her prominent jowls had been removed somehow. She did not look like the Rosevelyn that I knew. I had to look away. It was perverse, in some way. Disrespectful, almost. But no one else seemed to mind, so I didn’t say anything.
Later that day, my dad drove me to the old house on the hill to pick up the Volvo. The driveway was packed with cars. We walked up the loose brick stairs to the front door, which was wide open. Two large men with tattoos were carrying an antique couch through the door. We slid past them. There was a crude cardboard sign in the parlor. ROSEVELYN HARRISON ESTATE SALE. All sorts of people were going from room to room, picking things up, examining them very closely. My father and I walked through the house. There were price tags on literally everything. Little handmade yellow price tags. Some of the Hummels were going for $50 a pop. The antique Santas in the kitchen were $25. The 50s-era dishware ranged from $2 to $10 apiece. The loveseats were $75. Everything had a price. It was perverse. I remember being personally offended, walking through that house. I felt like they were selling pieces of Rosevelyn’s soul or something, like the estate sale company or whoever had organized this had no regard for human life, like they didn't care who Rosevelyn was as a person. As if the moment she died, they swooped in like vultures, tagged every part of her with some arbitrary number, and then opened her soul up to the public and said, “Feast, my pretties, to your heart’s content,” all to make a profit. It was sickening to me. It was gross, disrespectful, and consumeristic. I couldn’t fucking stand it. And when my father and I made it to his old bedroom, where I saw those yellow price tags tacked onto all my dad’s old stuff, I couldn’t hold it in any longer.
I turned to my dad and said, “Who would fucking do this?”
And he said, “What do you mean, son?”
“What sort of asshole would just sell all of Rosevelyn’s stuff like this? She collected this stuff. It was important to her. It had sentimental value. They’re even selling some of your old stuff, Dad. Don’t you care about that? It’s fucking greedy, and gross, that's what it is.”
“I did this.”
I paused for a moment. I think I even did a double take. I wasn’t sure what I was hearing. “What?”
“I hired the estate sale company.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “What? Why? Why would you do that?”
A small family entered the room. A woman started rummaging through the closet. A man was examining the boombox. A young boy was cycling through baseball cards. My father and I were just standing there, watching this unfold. I was shaking. Something like self-righteous fury had consumed my soul. My fists were clenched. I felt like I was about to scream.
Trying to contain myself, I turned to leave the room.
But just as I was about to leave, my dad stepped into the doorway, blocking me, then he placed a hand on my shoulder and said, “None of this is important, son. Rosevelyn’s not here anymore.”
I looked him straight in the face, thinking like duh, obviously she’s not here anymore. What do you think I am, stupid? I’m a grown thirty-year-old man. Don’t patronize me, asshole. Get the fuck out of my way.
Then he placed a hand on his chest and said, “She’s in here.”
Later that night, I drove home in Rosevelyn’s 1998 Volvo V70 GLT.
It reminded me of a boxy silver caterpillar. It was all segmented and rode real close to the ground. It had elongated rear lights composed of several smaller square lights, like a pair of compound eyes. It also had cat-like features. Its front-facing car face was a cat face. It had big feline headlights squinted on either side of an oversized grille reminiscent of the mesh of a wet cat nose. Below the grille was a slightly curved line of black open space, like a neutral but satisfied feline expression, as if it had just filled itself on treats and nip or something. The back hatch opened to a significant amount of storage space. It had that distinct nineties car smell, the kind of smell that, due to the breakdown of dead animal matter, only gets stronger as time passes. You could practically see the warm musty leather smell billowing out in thick golden-brown clouds whenever you opened the doors. The front dash was all analog, with little plastic lines arcing back and forth for fuel usage and miles per hour. The clock had numbers made of those small green rectangles you see on ancient digital alarm clocks. There was no CD player, only radio and cassette, so I bought one of those cassette-to-AUX adapters to play music with my phone, and I'm still mystified as to how that actually works. Pushing down the gas pedal produced acceleration akin to a small fart that got louder the longer you held your foot down. It had no cup holders, so I had to order some cheap plastic inserts that fit between the seats. The brakes were flat-out dangerous. It ate batteries like they were Tic Tacs or something, which ended up costing me a small fortune. And I'm sure it failed all modern-day carbon emission tests. But the car was undeniably cool and retro.
I didn't drive the Volvo for long though, mostly because it seriously broke down only a few months after I got it, but also because it depressed the living hell out of me, because the car wasn't just undeniably cool and retro, it was also haunted.
Every now and then, as far back as I can remember, during the Thanksgiving-Christmas months, my father would take me to my grandma’s house up in Watkinsville, Georgia, to check in on old Rosevelyn. She lived alone in this three-story burgundy brick house on a hill off a side road miles outside of town. The house was photographic. Virginia Creeper crept along the walls, and fuzzy green moss grew between every brick. I imagined the house itself was averse to change, like an inert brick giant standing steadfast and tall against the tides of time, showing faint signs of age but still holding strong. The driveway ran beside a retaining wall that held back a raised lawn, leading to a basement garage that felt almost underground. You had to walk up loose brick steps to even get to her front yard, which looked down on the driveway from the brick wall, the top of which was covered in thick grass. As a child, I would T-pose myself perilously on the top of the wall, descend its elevation all the way to the end and back, and as a teenager, I would sit on the wall, legs dangling, Nokia phone in one hand, texting my girlfriend about how bored I was, and as an adult, I would stand atop the wall, pining nostalgically about how I used to do all those things. But from that high perch, regardless of era, one thing remained constant, Rosevelyn’s 1998 Volvo V70 GLT, parked in the shade of the towering oaks.
Rosevelyn had a driver’s license but hated driving, so from visit to visit, until I was like thirty years old, the Volvo never moved. It was always in that same spot, right up until her death.
The inside of the house was static. It was large but felt somehow small. The front door had a knob right in the middle, and the knob itself was surrounded by ornate gold trim, making it awkward to twist. The door opened to a large room with antique couches and a grand piano. It was more of a parlor, really. The room was sunken somewhat, with steps on either end, and it was long, so as a child I would run back and forth, sometimes stopping to play simple melodies on the piano. The parlor connected to both the living room and the kitchen, themselves connected without walls or doors between them. The living room was cramped, with an antique couch and some musty love seats and a television set all behind a standing screen, and there was a large sliding glass door on the far end that opened to a steep backyard that was unkempt and dotted with oaks. There was only one lamp in the living room, and despite the glass door being uncovered, it was somehow always dark orange and gloomy in there. A number of tables and shelves lined the walls, atop which were family photos and dusty tomes and knickknacks, particularly Hummels, of which she had hundreds, everywhere, some set up in little scenes behind an ornate glass cabinet. Angelic porcelain children laughing, tossing balls, and playing little flutes. There was a desk in the corner, near the entrance to the kitchen, where an old typewriter sat, surrounded by letters, stamps, and fountain pens. She seemed to be an avid writer but produced no notable works and never talked about it. As a young woman, she was a real estate agent, and, when she got much older, started working for my dad’s real estate company, but as far as I could tell, she didn’t do any actual work, although by her desk, there was an old wooden sign with CALL ROSEVELYN HARRISON 760-6231 in bright red font. That number connects to a dead line now. I imagine the sign was probably staked in a plot of land somewhere long ago, but by the time I was like ten, it had become just another relic of her past. There were little historical relics like this all over her house. The kitchen was full of them. The cabinets were filled with ancient tableware. Dishes and plates and bowls with all sorts of ornate trim and images imprinted on them, images in that distinct 50s-style Americana artwork with rosy-cheeked children with big dimples that looked both photorealistic and incredibly uncanny. These things held special sentimental value to her for some reason. The kitchen window stool was decorated with Santas and elves from bygone Christmases. There was no dishwasher, everything was done by hand. The kitchen sink was sunk into the counter and made from vitreous china. The silverware might have been actual silver. Some sort of elaborately patterned red cloth draped every surface. The pantry was full of years-old Little Debbie Oatmeal Cream Pies that she would offer me whenever I visited, regardless of my age, and they tasted great. I grew to love Oatmeal Cream Pies. Beyond the living room was a long hallway that connected to all three bedrooms in the home. There were no televisions in these bedrooms, only antique lamps with ornate shades and big mirrors and nightstands on which King James sat. My father’s old childhood bedroom had been turned into a guest room, but remnants of his youth remained. Baseball cards, sports memorabilia, an ancient radio boombox, loose cassettes from the 70s and 80s, and even some of his old clothing deep in the walk-in closet. I got the impression she kept these things as a reminder. That’s probably why the interior of the home hadn’t changed in decades. Maybe the permanence helped her in some way, made her less lonely. Maybe she thought if she just left things the way they were, she would never forget the past, never forget who she was, never forget what she did. Right outside my dad’s old bedroom was a big wooden door to the basement. As a child, looking down from the top of the long stairwell, it was like staring down into a monster’s den, so I never went down there. As a teenager, it was mysterious and alluring, so I would work up the nerve to creep down the creaky wooden steps, but when I got to the very bottom, I would get spooked due to the lack of light and quickly climb back upstairs, feeling as if a ghost was on my back the whole time. As an adult, I would stare down that dark stairwell and see nothing but an existential void. At least that’s how it felt the last time I was there, at the estate sale.
Sometime in October 2020, I was in my office playing video games, and I received a call from my dad. He usually started every call with some comment about how I hadn’t called him in months, but this time, in a solemn tone, all he said was my name. Forrest.
I thought maybe he was joking around, so I said, “Dad.”
“Your grandma’s in the hospital.”
“Is she OK? What happened?”
“She fell down the basement stairs.”
“Is she OK?”
There was a weird silence. I couldn’t even hear the normal background static, like he had covered the phone’s microphone with his hand or something.
“Is she OK?”
“I hadn’t heard from her in almost a week.”
“What do you mean?”
“She fell down the stairs, Forrest.”
“I know, you said that.”
“She was down there for days.”
Something happened with my stomach, like a phantom had reached through my flesh and twisted at my insides or something. Some horrible revelation reached my body before it had reached my mind, and when my mind caught up, I stared off into the wall, wide-eyed and speechless.
“She was down there for days, Forrest.”
“I… I heard you.”
“I drove down there. To her house. To check on her. The Volvo was still there. All the doors were locked.”
“How did you get in?”
“I went to the basement door, the one by the garage.”
There was another long pause. This time I heard something like a forced cough. When my dad returned, his voice was shaking.
“I looked through the window, the one on the door,” he said, pausing again.
“OK, what did you see? What happened?”
“It was dark, Forrest. I didn’t see anything. But it felt weird. Something was off. I got this feeling in my stomach, you know the one. And I don’t know what I was thinking, but I punched through the glass, cut my hand all up.”
“Are you OK?”
“That doesn’t matter.”
“...”
“I punched through, unlocked the door from the inside, let myself in. Then, first thing I did was, I went to the stairwell to go upstairs. It was dark. I had trouble finding the light switch, but I knew it was at the bottom of the stairwell.”
“Dad.”
“When I turned the light on,” he said, pausing.
“It’s OK, Dad. I don’t need to know.”
A long silence followed this leg of the conversation. I didn’t know what to say. I thought about Rosevelyn tumbling down the dark stairwell, alone, landing on the hard concrete floor, not being able to move, just lying there, maybe a broken leg or a broken hip. I didn’t want to know. Why was she going down there to begin with? What was she thinking? I thought about her just lying there, her body twisted and mangled, screaming out for help, no food or water, writhing in pain, for days. The thought of it made me sick. I started feeling terrible for having not spent much time with her. I never called her. I never sent cards. I never wished her a happy birthday. Nothing. When I was a kid, I thought she was boring. When I was a teen, I thought she was boring. When I was an adult, I told myself I was just too busy, too busy to care. And then I started feeling bad for feeling bad, like how selfish am I just thinking about myself here when she was the one down there writhing in pain at the bottom of a dark stairwell for days. And I couldn’t even imagine how my father was feeling. I had never lost a parent before. I didn’t know what it was like. There was no way for me to empathize. I didn’t know what the hell to say to him. There were no words. I started wondering what was going through Rosevelyn’s head when she was down there on the concrete. I wondered if her life had flashed before her eyes, like they say. I wondered if she had thought about me, how I never called, how I never seemed to care. I wondered if she had cursed me in her mind. And then I started feeling bad about making this all about me again, and then I started feeling really bad because I had started thinking about her Volvo. My car was a wreck. I needed a new car. I wondered if I could maybe have her Volvo. I don’t know why I thought this, but I did, and it made me feel really bad. It made me feel so bad that I closed my eyes shut for what felt like ten minutes. I breathed in, breathed out. I tried to stop myself from thinking about myself. Then I started thinking if she had been angry down there, angry that after 84 years it had to end this way, alone at the bottom of a stairwell. She was a Christian woman. I knew that. But I wondered if, maybe, down there on the hard concrete, I wondered if maybe she had been angry with God for doing this to her. Or maybe not. Maybe she was faithful until the very end. Maybe this was all part of God’s plan, maybe that’s what she had thought down there while she was splayed out, unable to move, on the hard concrete, in total darkness. I don’t know. Maybe on the way down, maybe she just hit her head, passed out. Maybe she just dreamed a pleasant dream the whole time. Maybe her mind went into self-preservation mode, flipped off her consciousness, flooded her body with endorphins, put her to sleep, made her dream a pleasant dream. Maybe she dreamed of my father as a young boy. Maybe her death came so swiftly that she didn’t even know it was happening to begin with. I stopped thinking about the Volvo. I started thinking that maybe she hadn’t felt any pain, and this thought made me feel a little better, until I remembered what my dad had said about Rosevelyn being in the hospital.
I’m not sure how much time had passed since we last said a word to each other, but when I broke the silence, I said, “How’s she doing, you know, in the hospital?”
“She’s in a coma.”
“How quickly did it, you know, happen?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, was she conscious the whole time, or did she, you know, did she pass out?”
“I don’t know.”
“What about the doctors? What are they saying?”
“They don’t know either.”
There was another silence, shorter this time.
“I want you to come down in three weeks,” my dad said, his voice lower than before.
“To see her, in the hospital?”
“No, for the funeral.”
“But she’s alive, I thought.”
“She is.”
“...”
“I don’t know, Forrest.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know?”
“I just don’t know, son.”
“Tell me, Dad.”
“I have to go now.”
“Wait.”
“I’ll send you the date.”
And then the line went dead.
My father gave a speech at the funeral. I recited a poem. I don’t remember the details all that well. It was an open casket. Rosevelyn was on display for everyone to see. But she wasn’t herself. Her face was weird, waxy, made up. Her prominent jowls had been removed somehow. She did not look like the Rosevelyn that I knew. I had to look away. It was perverse, in some way. Disrespectful, almost. But no one else seemed to mind, so I didn’t say anything.
Later that day, my dad drove me to the old house on the hill to pick up the Volvo. The driveway was packed with cars. We walked up the loose brick stairs to the front door, which was wide open. Two large men with tattoos were carrying an antique couch through the door. We slid past them. There was a crude cardboard sign in the parlor. ROSEVELYN HARRISON ESTATE SALE. All sorts of people were going from room to room, picking things up, examining them very closely. My father and I walked through the house. There were price tags on literally everything. Little handmade yellow price tags. Some of the Hummels were going for $50 a pop. The antique Santas in the kitchen were $25. The 50s-era dishware ranged from $2 to $10 apiece. The loveseats were $75. Everything had a price. It was perverse. I remember being personally offended, walking through that house. I felt like they were selling pieces of Rosevelyn’s soul or something, like the estate sale company or whoever had organized this had no regard for human life, like they didn't care who Rosevelyn was as a person. As if the moment she died, they swooped in like vultures, tagged every part of her with some arbitrary number, and then opened her soul up to the public and said, “Feast, my pretties, to your heart’s content,” all to make a profit. It was sickening to me. It was gross, disrespectful, and consumeristic. I couldn’t fucking stand it. And when my father and I made it to his old bedroom, where I saw those yellow price tags tacked onto all my dad’s old stuff, I couldn’t hold it in any longer.
I turned to my dad and said, “Who would fucking do this?”
And he said, “What do you mean, son?”
“What sort of asshole would just sell all of Rosevelyn’s stuff like this? She collected this stuff. It was important to her. It had sentimental value. They’re even selling some of your old stuff, Dad. Don’t you care about that? It’s fucking greedy, and gross, that's what it is.”
“I did this.”
I paused for a moment. I think I even did a double take. I wasn’t sure what I was hearing. “What?”
“I hired the estate sale company.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “What? Why? Why would you do that?”
A small family entered the room. A woman started rummaging through the closet. A man was examining the boombox. A young boy was cycling through baseball cards. My father and I were just standing there, watching this unfold. I was shaking. Something like self-righteous fury had consumed my soul. My fists were clenched. I felt like I was about to scream.
Trying to contain myself, I turned to leave the room.
But just as I was about to leave, my dad stepped into the doorway, blocking me, then he placed a hand on my shoulder and said, “None of this is important, son. Rosevelyn’s not here anymore.”
I looked him straight in the face, thinking like duh, obviously she’s not here anymore. What do you think I am, stupid? I’m a grown thirty-year-old man. Don’t patronize me, asshole. Get the fuck out of my way.
Then he placed a hand on his chest and said, “She’s in here.”
Later that night, I drove home in Rosevelyn’s 1998 Volvo V70 GLT.
no subject
Date: 2025-10-16 11:23 pm (UTC)This is your other grandmother, then? Not the one you spent summers with, I'm guessing? So the grandmother you spent summers with was your mom's mother? ... Maybe/probably you said this in the other pieces.
Interesting-to-me detail is the presence of real estate as a business. .... Thinking of "Supply and Demand," with the real-estate bigot.
You will also realize that I'm reading this at a low-watt point in my day from the next question, but:
Then he placed a hand on his chest and said, “She’s in here.”
Later that night, I drove home in Rosevelyn’s 1998 Volvo V70 GLT.
--The narrator had been disgusted by what an estate sale does, commoditizing the remnants of a person's life. But earlier he'd also kind of wanted the car (while hating himself for having that wish). Then his father comes out with that pat statement that I quote. And then the narrator ends up with the car. So --here's the low-watt question: are you making a comment about self-interest winning out over moral outrage/ the dad's remark giving the narrator a pass, so to speak, so he can get the car?
And we know from the start of the story that he doesn't keep the car--so he gets it... but then the depressingness of the grandmother's end and the estate sale overwhelm his desire to have the car, in the end.
Sorry, I'm being a little baby who needs to be walked through the story. I should probably wait to comment until I'm firing on more cylinders, but now we're dealing with sunk costs, as I've put all these words in the box, so....
no subject
Date: 2025-10-17 12:01 am (UTC)This is a true story.
Regarding the grandma question, yes. Susu, who I guess is a legend among my small circle of writing friends now, which is something that pleases me greatly, is my mom's mom. Different grandma.
Regarding your quote-unquote "low-watt questions," I don't fully know. I just sort of wrote this on a roll and published it, but there were some prominent themes I was thinking about while writing it. One of those themes was materialism. I fancy myself a sort of anti-materialist in some ways, so it's interesting to me that I immediately place value, sentimental or otherwise, on material things. When Dad goes, "None of this matters," I wrote that quite literally to mean, like, none of this material stuff matters.
What happens afterward, which is left sort of ambiguous I guess, is that the narrator was temporarily swayed by the dad's emotional gesture, that Rosevelyn is literally not here and her material possessions are not her, and that she was more than just the stuff she left behind, if that makes sense. But the narrator later is still not at peace with this idea, which is why the car still haunted him.
There was also something going through my head like, the dad is trying to "move on" by selling all the stuff, so the son tries to "move on" as well, but is having trouble doing so.
However, I think my main "point" with this story is that these things are very complicated.
no subject
Date: 2025-10-18 04:18 am (UTC)(And yes, your other grandmother definitely is legend in my mind!)
A lot of memory is embodied in physical things. The object's the vessel or the key for the memory. So it makes sense to me that it's hard to just let all those objects disappear.
no subject
Date: 2025-10-18 02:09 pm (UTC)Yeah. It's almost like the physical thing is not a physical thing anymore. It becomes more like a psychic anchor almost.