Below, in the darkness...

I've been seeing all these folks give up their writing spaces lately...I'm not one of those folks. I prefer description to photos, so if you'll please take me hand and follow me.

Our basement is a dark place, a strewing of clothes and broken fixtures, the regurgitated rejections of a million thrift stores and yard sales. Nothing there is new or in good condition, a washer which goes off-balance and dances over the floor in a banging ballet during late night hours, a dryer which stinks of melted plastic even on low. Clothes, washed or waiting, form miniature mountains among concrete, and no insulation serves to block ceiling from floor above. The lighting is horrific to an extreme, flickering randomly from flourescent sun to bare bulbs daring to plunge shadow into complete darkness, and throughout it all is a stench of cat piss older than whatever eldritch gods one may believe in. Among, above, amidst all of this stands two walls, wooden and painted gunmetal gray where paint hasn't sloughed off in massive collections.

The walls sit in a corner, forming a room locked tight though there is no necessity. Jokingly we refer to it as the "killing room", a place so forlorn and absent of feeling that it seems taken directly from a horror movie lair and landed gently and in our basement. A bare buld, the only strong one in the basement, shines off two wooden and two concrete walls, thoguh light is muted by cobwebs. one shelf sits occupied by an odd collection of screws, paint cans, broken tools and a single sword of indeterminate and hopefully innocent origin. High on the outside wall, inches below the bottom of the upper floor, sits a chute sealed over with welding and luck, painted black. An old coal room, still smelling of dust and dirt, of solid earth picked bare. Sparse on all the senses, sectioned away from the progression of time.

And in the center of it, my desk.

Got a good picture?