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Show The Sound If our house in Virginia was a cave, the house we rented in Seattle was a dungeon. In the nine months we lived there, the rain never stopped. My father's graduate program in international ocean law started the end of August, and my parents had little time to find a place to live. Our household goods needed to be unloaded, my brothers and I registered for school. Maybe because we lived in Seattle less than a year or maybe because I hated the house as much as I did, it is the one place I lived as a child where I never learned the address. I couldn't even tell you the street it was on; a year of my life lost somewhere in Bellevue. Another split level, this house's basement also had a fireplace and cinderblock walls. The rug was shag and a burnt-orange color, full of sfraightpins the previous tenants had left, tiny landmines made of silver that planted pricks of blood on the arches and balls of our feet. We wore shoes inside and learned to sit on the couch. My room sat down the hall from the pin-infested family room. Scott slept in the basement with me. Though years younger, he learned to crawl out of the skinny window that opened onto the side yard, using a combination of bed and chair to push his body over the sill. It never occurred to me to try, even after he successfully escaped several times to play with a red-haired boy named Jonathon who lived down the street. Monsters lived in my bedroom, in the built-in shelves and drawers that squeeked when I opened them. At night, no light coming through my vine-covered window, they winked at me from the darkness. I remember it being perpetually black. 100 |