There's a moment in Morbid Fascinations where David discovers a wood board with a child's scribbles on the backside of it. This is one of the experiences I had in the real life house that the story is inspired by. In the book it is part of a creepy discovery while my main character is inspecting a suspicious noise from upstairs. The real story is a bit more mundane.
In the winter of 2004-2005 I was awaiting the birth of my first child and converting a small bedroom in the upstairs of the house into a nursery. There were built in drawers and a cubby hole that had previously had a television sitting in it. It was a recessed shelf sitting about 32" off the floor. I was preparing to paint this small alcove and lifted the television to move it to another room. There was a piece of loose, thin wood stuck to the bottom of the appliance and I wasn't even aware that it came loose until it fell on my foot while I was walking between rooms. After I set the television in the other upstairs bedroom I came back and picked up the board. One side was painted in this sad, pale mint green color generally reserved for a great grandmother's living room walls. On the back side of it were a bunch of doodles in pencil. There were quirky little poems and random phrases scrawled on the board but one little phrase from the author stood out; "Nixon Was Here."
At first I thought it may have been a joke from someone regarding our nation's rather infamous presidential history. As I painted I inspected more boards and drawers and discovered more doodles and images on the undersides of many things. Some little hands had been bored. Many of the pictures were of the yard and people playing. They were fairly typical except that they were all drawn from the perspective of someone in the house looking out. I figured it was probably a child who had been bored on a rainy day or two or ten and decided to pass the time by being a bit mischievous while left unsupervised.
Time passed and it wasn't until a couple of years later, in the summer of 2007 when my toddler and I would go for walks through the shady lanes of the cemetery across the way that I stumbled upon something a bit more interesting. I had limited information about the history of the house but I knew last names of some of the families that had lived there over the years. I stumbled across a headstone in the cemetery with the family name on it. While my two year old spun around in circles with a dandelion I looked over the family names. One of the stones belonged to an 11 year old child named Nixon. I stood there, looking down at this stone and the dots all connected. Most likely he was ill and didn't go outside a lot. He passed the time by watching his family out in the yard from his bedroom window. The view was his escape and he chronicled his little fantasies of playing in the backyard with them on what may have been the only available surfaces. He hid them on the undersides of boards to avoid getting in trouble.
Nixon is a character in Morbid Fascinations of David Bennett. He is a lonely, frightened soul desperately seeking escape from the cruelty of his world. It is a small tribute to a little boy that I wish I could have known in life. His quiet, brief time in this world forgotten by all nearly a century later can finally have a fraction of his own tale told.
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