(You can also listen to this story here.)
LaLinda loved garage sales. Not that she bought anything, although occasionally she would find a treasure someone was departing with. But mostly, it was more a chance for her to browse and socialize with her neighbors. And she had always been an early riser, so that gave her an advantage over those sloths who showed up to garage sales by mid-morning. Why even bother?
So this Saturday, long before the break of dawn, LaLinda yawned, stretched, got up and made her bed, carefully tucking in the floral quilt with gold squares, and making sure the floral print pillowcases had not a single wrinkle.
She went to the kitchen and started up the percolator. Breakfast was a cup of canned fruit cocktail in syrup, toast (wonder bread and real margarine), and a glass of Tang for her vitamin C. With the coffee ready she sat at her little round dining table with an orange inlay and read through the garage sale ads, circling the promising addresses.
With that done, sat at her avocado divan and donned her Dr. Sholl’s.
As LaLinda stepped out of her house with yellow siding and pink shutters, and the little window box garden with cheerful plastic flowers, the flower wreath almost fell off the door.
She had found it at a previous garage sale for a steal, but no matter how she hung it, it fell off more often than not. But that’s the unpredictable life of LaLinda Leeda LaLuninda.
“Today will be an adventure!” This had been LaLinda’s mantra for decades, regardless of what she did that day. Even a trip to the grocery can be an adventure with the right mindset.
She had never understood how others had bad days. ‘There is no such thing as a bad day, just bad attitudes.’ LaLinda smirked as she climbed into the luxurious front seat of her Ford Pinto.
The first few garage sales had little to offer, a few old dolls, and one had a nice umbrella stand, shaped like an elephant’s leg of all things! Now she had seen it all! But nothing worth buying.
“Third time’s the charm,” she thought, pulling her Ford Pinto up to the third garage sale. At first she thought it would be a bust, just old clothes and musty furniture that would be better served in the dump. But then, at one table filled with yellow pages (who buys old yellow pages? LaLinda thought and chuckled). At that table was the prize of the day!
An exact replica of her house! It was uncanny. There it was, a little model house with the same yellow siding and pink shutters and a window box garden with cheerful plastic flowers.. And the front door even had a little floral wreath on it!
Amazing! What were the odds? She tried to look inside, but the windows were painted blue. What a shame. Could you imagine if there were little furniture in it? LaLinda cackled at the thought, and the garage sale proprietor, Cheryl, came over. “Good Morning LaLinda! Bargain hunting, I take it?”
LaLinda smiled. ”Good morning, Cheryl. Where on Earth did you find this?” Cheryl looked at the little house and frowned. She shook her head and said, “You know, I don’t remember seeing that before. It was just in my basement when I was gathering things for the sale. So, it’s yours,” she smiled.
LaLinda turned to go
Cheryl barked, ”Yours for ten dollars.”
LaLinda, no stranger to the art of haggling, was ready. “Ten dollars? For something you didn’t even know you had? Besides, it’s scratched. (It wasn’t.) and the paint is peeling (It wasn’t.) I’ll give you three.”
Cheryl squinted at the house. “I don’t see scratches or peeling paint. Besides, this looks exactly like your house. How often are you going to come across something like that? I can maybe drop it down to eight.”
Normally, LaLinda was a bulldog with garage sale haggling, but this little house pulled at her. She sighed. “Fine. I’ll give you eight. Do you take checks?”
With her model house safe in the passenger seat, she drove back home. LaLinda had been torn about whether to see if her lucky streak would continue, maybe try a few more garage sales.
But something about this little house felt, well, urgent. Like this little house just had to get back to its big, what? Brother or sister? The idea was so silly LaLinda snickered to herself. My, what would someone think to see her driving her luxurious Ford Pinto and snickering, when she was the only one in the car? Such a silly day! Such a silly, adventurous day!
She pulled up to her driveway and thought about where she would display her recent treasure. Fireplace mantle. That would be perfect if only she had a mantel, or a fireplace, or a mantel. But she had a curio cabinet, and with some rearranging, this little darling would be front and center. Her prized ceramic owl reading a book may just have to move over.
LaLinda parked her Ford Pinto in the carport and looked over to the passenger seat. “Well, little house. We’re home.” The little model house seemed to hum eagerly.
LaLinda got three steps into her house with the new find before blacking out.
LaLinda awoke on her living room floor.
”Oh, dear,” she thought, looking around with blurry eyes. “What happened?” She was worried she was having a stroke and cautiously sat up. She didn’t feel sick – no weakness, numbness, or any other the other things she had been told to look for in the AARP magazines.
She carefully got up and worked her way over to her –
Where was her avocado divan? The walls weren’t right either. Her collection of fine “starving artist” landscape paintings was missing. Instead was a large, boxlike sofa, an armchair of the same boxy style, and a large television, but with no cord. LaLinda paced the perimeter of the room. The metal floor lamp didn’t have a cord; the rotary phone didn’t have a cord. And the walls didn’t have a single electrical outlet. She bumped against the coffee table and yelped. It wasn’t that the little, nondescript wooden table was sharp. When she hit it with her shin, it had no give whatsoever. She reached down, and after rubbing her shin, tried moving the coffee table. It was glued, or nailed, or bolted to the floor. She tried the floor lamp as well and found the same thing.
LaLinda felt her breath getting faster. Did she have a stroke after all? Trying to keep panic at bay, she explored the rest of the house before drawing any conclusions.
The kitchen was a kitchen – stovetop, oven, refrigerator. None of it — the cheerful earth tones of her appliances. It wasn’t HER kitchen. The dining room set was a bland square table with four bland chairs, all bolted down.
Her bedroom lacked the personal touch she had given it; the pink walls had been painted white, like the rest of the house. The bedsheets were a horrible, bland green. She tried lifting the pillows, but they had somehow been attached to the bed, and the sheets wouldn’t move.
How would someone do this to her house? And Why? This made little sense. Not one darn bit of sense. She touched her lips in shame at using the D-word. LaLinda abhorred cussing.
Stroke, Nightmare, whatever was going on, LaLinda had had enough. It was time to leave! She made a beeline for the front door, well, as quick a beeline as LaLinda could make.
The front doorknob wouldn’t move. The door wouldn’t open. The door wasn’t locked; it wasn’t a door at all. The hinges were missing, and the doorframe was nothing more than a large rectangle of wooden molding. The wooden door itself was nothing more than brown paint with painted-on wood grain.
”Help! Help!” LaLinda screamed through the non-door.
She tried the windows next, and her heart sank. She would have looked out the front window, normally seeing her window box garden of beautiful plastic flowers. But everything was blue. There wasn’t a window at all. Just like the door, it was a wall painted over to look like a window.
LaLinda screamed herself hoarse into the empty house.
LaLinda sat, sat and waited, after trying every possible door and window for an escape, what else was left for her to do? How did this happen? She replayed her steps for the day, and remembered the garage sales, and the little model house with the blue windows, the same blue as these so-called windows.
This made no sense. Was she inside the tiny house? And if so, what was the tiny house inside?
She thought about what an awful day it had been. How terrible! Then a little voice in her head said, “No such thing as a bad day, just bad attitudes. “
LaLinda nodded to herself. She wasn’t going to let this get her down. She was LaLinda Leeda LaLuninda for gosh sakes! She didn’t even cover her mouth for saying the ‘g’ word. That’s how serious she was.
LaLinda sat and thought. She couldn’t go through the door or windows. But what if? She searched the house for anything, any tool she could use. Nothing. The cabinets were empty. The closets were empty. The dresser wouldn’t even open.
“Time to improvise.” LaLinda said to herself. The floor lamp didn’t work, yet the room stayed lit. LaLinda walked to the lamp, no bulb even. Just a metal pole with a shade on top. She tore the shade off and tugged at the pole. At first it didn’t move, but as she grabbed it and leaned back, her weight added heft. “Please don’t bend, please don’t bend.”
She was in luck; the lamp pole didn’t bend; it snapped apart from the floor. LaLinda fell backwards onto her bottom. She stood back up with a sore backside, but now she had a tool, and if needed, a weapon.
She returned to the fake front door and felt the wall again. It felt like regular drywall. She took the ragged, broken end of the metal pole and jabbed it into the wall. It went right through! Yay!
It would take a while, but she could punch her way through this wall, escape, and demand her eight dollars back!
First, she looked out the hole and saw something that caught her breath. Larger than life was a statue of her prized ceramic owl reading a book. What the heck was her curio piece doing outside of this house?
LaLinda went to a different corner and poked a hole. Looking out, she saw the rest of the inside of her curio cabinet. Knickknacks as far as the eye could see. All enormous statues. At first she thought they were snow-covered, but it was dust. Dust over everything. The impeccably neat LaLinda shivered at the collection of dust, then chided herself. She had bigger problems at the moment.
How was all this possible? She made a third hole in the drywall on the other side to see if she could get a look past the cabinet. Through the glass of the cabinet was assuredly her living room. Her avocado divan, her starving artist landscape paintings, but everything looked enormous! She had to escape. She couldn’t wait another minute in this… in this… whatever this was.
LaLinda returned to the front door to expand the first hole she made and froze. The hole was gone! The fake door, down to its painted wood grain, was fully intact.
The other holes she made sealed themselves as well.
LaLinda took the metal pole and poked several holes in the wall, then waited and watched. After a minute, each of the holes shrunk, and the house sealed the holes back up.
LaLinda backed away. Flopped down on the hard furniture, and wept.
Trevor LaLuinda, and his sister, Tresha, were packing up their mother’s house.
She had gone missing six months prior without a trace. Nobody knew what happened to the retired interior decorator and mother of two adult children and three grandchildren. All the police could find is that on the day she went missing, she had gone about her usual Saturday morning routine, mostly perusing garage sales and visiting with neighbors.
Chreyl Briggles, a neighbor and friend, sold her a small model house that had resembled LaLinda’s home. And that was the last anyone saw of her.
Even the small model house, the one that supposedly looked like LaLinda’s modest yellow house, couldn’t be found.
Now, six months and a pending foreclosure later, Trevor and Tresha had to clear out the house for sale.
Trevor and Tresha looked all over for the model house, hoping that may give investigators the clue that would solve their mother’s disappearance.
The closest Trevor found was one tiny model house, but it looked nothing like his mother’s. It sat next to a ceramic owl reading a book. But it wasn’t a little yellow house; it was a two-story brick house with green trim and a little Eastern State University flag.
Trevor showed it to his sister. “Little house. Do you want it?”
Tresha looked at the little model and wrinkled her nose. “Nope. Put it on the ‘to sell’ pile. I’ll price it tonight. “
Trevor tossed the house onto a pile and kept working.
Early the next morning, Markel McCardle, woke for his usual round of garage sales. He made a pot of coffee and scanned the newspaper, circling promising addresses. Markel didn’t often buy things; he enjoyed the thrill of the hunt, finding the little treasures that others overlooked.
“Today will be an adventure!” Markel thought as he locked the door to his two-story brick house with green trim and an Eastern State University flag.