Sketch for a new setting - Memories

It was now a dirty, run-down derelict house with most of the windows boarded up, with a crumbling chimney and a tremendous road roaring past it just several steps away, bringing dirt and noise and smells of processed fuel, but it wasn't always that way. He didn't really get to see it in the days of former glory, but, from whatever pictures and old videos left, he could see that once, it was different. It felt inhabited, it felt like what he thought a home should.

He still remembered the old stories told by his parents about the place. It was rather fascinating to him at the time, hearing of how seven children, just like him back then, managed to keep the house together. How'd it go, would he still remember it after all that he'd drank today and all the previous days of the year? Ah, yes.

It was still quite a bit before the Depression hit that the house was bought and built by his great-grandparents. From what he was told, they met by chance at some medical facility that was searching for a cure for a then-rare virus, RMD (Note: Rapid Memory Deterioration), and, at a better period, when the cure was seemed to have been found, finally realized and remembered that they quite liked each others and eventually got married and took out a loan for the house.

It wasn't really a fancy house - from what he was told - though rather large regardless, it seems as though they planned to have numerous offspring, just like they indeed had. Two floors, metal roof, skin-toned house paint. It wasn't anything special. But it had a yard. And, from what he heard, a river. Just where the highway ran now, a river flowed before, clear, swift and blue. Drained in the post-Depression years when the country needed every coin it could scrape - probably sold off to some other, better-off place. He often tried to imagine the river in place of the road, staring at it from the attic, but every time he inevitably failed. At that thought, his arm grabbed for the glass.

In any case, it was all quite well for many years, around twenty, if he recalled right. Seven children were born in that time, all of them healthy and happy. But then, a disaster stroke - just as the eldest turned nineteen, their mother's illness suddenly re-emerged. At first, it was a slow decline, with small things forgotten, but eventually, things simply collapsed. She would not recognize her children, she would barely know her husband, the only thing that remained in her mind at all times was the house, and she was frequently horrified with "strangers" on her property.

In order to treat her, her husband took her to Sweden, the place where the research on the RMD continued. They never returned or were heard from again. This, of course, left the children in a very tight spot. Even before the Depression, getting by a decent amount of money was hard. The eldest kids went to work at various factories and construction sites, trying to get enough money to keep their younger siblings fed and dressed, the younger ones toiled at school and tried to make some money on their free time, and everyone was busy for many, many years, until finally, the youngest completed her studies and got a career of her own. Several years of prosperity followed.

Then, the Depression hit. Hundreds of thousands lost their money, jobs, minds, everything. A brief and inconclusive war with the now-unmentionable neighbours took lives of two of the seven siblings, another fell victim to a crazed customer opening fire in the broad daylight as he was asked to pay, one of the sisters married a shell-shocked war veteran and it all ended horribly one day, but the rest managed to make it through, though it was no rose garden for them, either. And he was one of the many scattered members of this bloodline. Coincidentally, the owner of the house.

He drained the glass, looking back over his shoulder at some slight noise. The corporate party was still going strong, though he already saw some barely-moving couples dragging each others off, presumably to their tiny little cells, where they could lock themselves up for the night and pretend to be elsewhere and elsewho. Then, with a brief chuckle, he swept the emptied glasses down to the street, following them with his drunken gaze as far as he could. They disappeared in the darkness long before he heard them shatter on the pavement beneath.