Chest or a Coffin
When I was more or less than10 years old my mom, brother and I were shopping in random stores in Monterey. Although I always love shopping in little hole in the wall “antique” (junk) stores, I hate it at the same time. I hate that feeling of being the only person in the store. As soon as you walk in, the store clerk greets you, and then watches your every move, almost as if I’m wearing a shirt that says “watch out, I steal” even though I don’t. In the cases where the employee doesn’t look at me as a thief they look at me in the sense of “please buy something, no one ever does and soon I’ll be out of business, my life will be ruined, and it will all be your fault.” I know it’s not my problem that they sell over priced trash in the middle of nowhere, but I always feel like it is.
The feeling was eased when we walked into one store and my mom came across an old chest. It appeared grey, but that was just the layer of dust covering it. It was big enough to lock a dead body in, and with noticing the broken latch, missing lock and worn-out, cracked leather straps wrapping around it’s entirety, it almost seemed as if the body that had been locked in it wasn’t dead, and they had escaped from their pre-mature coffin. Just looking at this piece of junky furniture exhausted me, but not my mother.
Upon laying eyes on the chest, she had to swallow that lump your get in your throat when you can’t hold back the tears. She approached the chest and slowly opened the heavy lid. “It smells just like my grandpa” she said, a smell I could not recognize, unless her grandpa smelled like dust and dead spiders. That smell, however, was more of a sales pitch than any antique dealer could’ve thrown her way. After a quick transaction, we were loading this dusty box into the car, and our drive home consisted of my mother telling stories of her grandfather and how she wished she could own not only this replica, but also his old chest she grew up around.
Being so young at the time, other than knowing the dictionary definition of ‘nostalgia’, I had no real comprehension of it. Anything from previous years in my life were still recent memories and as for any age younger than that, well, I still have a heard time believing people have real memories – not, “I saw those photos and home videos and fabricated the memory of that” - from when they were 3. My mother had showed me what it was like to reminisce, and really have that desire to yearn for the past.
That chest, her stories, that feeling she had and so clearly conveyed, made me realize now, why I have a strange love for horror movies.

Whenever I watch horror movies with my friends, right as the kill-ee is hiding from the kill-er someone will gasp, “can you imagine that? Running and hiding…for your life?” I’ll laugh to myself while another person chimes in, “How can they…I mean, I wouldn’t be able to think fast enough to escape.” I, however, could think fast enough to escape. Although my predator’s intent wasn’t to kill me, actually I still don’t know what his intent would’ve been had he caught me.
During summer vacation my mom would go to work, leaving my brother and me at home alone all day. These June and July days were a pretty standard routine. Waking up to a list of chores, one for me and one for my brother. My chores usually involved laundry, vacuuming, sweeping, feeding the cat and dogs, and loading then unloading the dishwasher, while my brother, Kevin’s chores were more labor inclusive but all around less tasks, such as washing the car or mowing the lawn, which I always wanted to do but my mom, to this day, will not let me operate a lawn mower. She fears that it will operate me and result in my death, by turning me into a “human smoothie” all over the back lawn.
After the chores were completed, we were free to do whatever we wished. On most days, we would ride our bikes around with the neighborhood kids. They didn’t actually live in the neighborhood, but since their parent’s owned the restaurant across the street from our house, they were always around. We would buy Jolt cola, with the idea in our heads that it’s intense amount of caffeine was the adolescent comparison to alcohol. We also bought Bianca, a peppermint breath spray that wouldn’t do anything other than burn your tongue, but to us, it was comparable to cocaine, even though we didn’t know what that was. Eventually we learned of Tiger Balm. This was a muscle relaxant, much like Icy-Hot, but we could only find it at a certain pharmacy, making it close to contraband. We would rub it on our arms and feel the burn, and then relief. We were desperate to free ourselves from the boredom of our mundane days.
There were other days though; the “woke up on the wrong side of the bed” days. I don’t know what would get into him, but there were days where Kevin was out to get me for no reason at all. He would get vicious and chase me throughout the house, into the yard, where I would find refuge in our motor-home, it would seem like a good idea, but only one entrance makes for only one exit; one that is very easily blocked by whoever enters last, which was always my brother. I very distinctly remember him entering, throwing a chair at my head, which I so quickly blocked, and then through my tears, watched him look around for another object he could catapult in my direction. When he ran out of ammunition he would silently retreat back into the house. I would sneak out, run to my room, which had no locks on the doors and scavenge for something to pry under the door to hold it in place. I learned that an oversized jack would work, for a while. The star-shaped metal prongs would fit under the door and the remaining legs helped support it. Much like a mother with extraordinary strength to save their child trapped under a car, my brother would throw open my “locked door” and I would run into the bathroom connected to my room. This door had a lock, but from the outside all you needed was a decently sized coin to turn what looked like a standard screw and you were in. I had a bad habit of getting myself into these “last one in, is the first one out” situations. He would eventually leave after what seemed like hours of torture.
As soon as it seemed silent in the rest of the house, I would flee to find a phone, contact my mother, tell her what was going on and then run back into my panic-room for safety. I could hear the phone ring and I knew it was my mom calling my brother to tell him to “cut it out” and that “it’s not very nice” of him to do such things. This would always backfire on me. My brother, who had calmed down since the chair throwing, was now enraged again and ready to kill.


When my mom saw a dirty chest, she remembered her childhood. When I see a victim in tears hiding for their life, I remember my childhood. I understood what it felt like to have to find a place to hide, gasp for a breath but remain silent, sneak around for a way to contact “authorities” and scavenge for anything to create a lock on a door. Living horror movies was my childhood summer, and watching them is my adult life. Screams for help and unnecessary violence are my antique store finds, although, I would never long for those events to happen to me again.