The Cigarette Case on the Dresser

Chapter 1: You Are Still Here

The first strange thing about the old mobile home was not the shadow.

It was the cigarettes.

Years later, when I think back on that night, I always return to that small detail. A cheap plastic cigarette case sitting on my mother’s dresser. A half-empty pack beside her perfume bottle. A simple thing that belonged to an ordinary life.

Nothing about it suggested fear.

Nothing about it suggested that a child walking ten steps through the dark would carry a memory for the rest of her life.

Back then, our neighborhood was the kind of place people forgot existed.

A quiet row of small homes surrounded by empty fields and old trees. Everyone knew everyone. Doors were left unlocked during the day. Children rode their bikes until the sun disappeared. The biggest excitement was when someone bought a new car or when a storm knocked down a tree.

My mother and grandmother lived next door to each other, separated by only a small patch of grass and a narrow walkway.

My grandmother’s house was where everyone gathered.

It always smelled like coffee, old furniture, and whatever meal she had cooked that afternoon. Her living room walls were covered with faded photographs of relatives who had passed away years before. Their faces watched over us from behind dusty glass, frozen in moments when life was still simple.