When I was nine I overheard my parents and their friends talking about a house that the military was renovating down the street. We lived on a military base in the late nineties in houses that had been built and then forgotten since the forties. The government was slowly renovating their houses, which really means that they were reluctantly scraping the ceilings of asbestos and adding the first new fixtures in years. As I eavesdropped, I learned that they found an intact skeleton underneath the bathtub in a house just a block down from me. I was instantly obsessed. I would lay underneath the water while taking a bath and listen for the sound of scratching or tapping. I was convinced that if there was a dead body underneath my neighbors’ tub, there could just as easily be one under mine. I held my breath for as long as I could stand, listening for anything. And, as you might know if you ever held your head underneath the surface of your bathtub water, sometimes the pipes do creak and tap. I have been unable to hold my head under water in the tub since then.
