"The Basement"

Emilie Dawson is a Rochester native, a world traveler, and writer. She is not a homeowner (yet) and was very inspired by the many lives of the 7 bedroom Park Ave rooming house she rents. The Basement was originally published in OFIC Magazine Issue #8. Personal essays can be found at edawsonwrites.substack.com or

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“THE BASEMENT”

By Emilie Dawson

It’s always the last stop on the prospective tenant’s tour. The dank smell of the cement floor diametrically opposed to the fresh baked cookies of an open house. It needs to be shown, of course. “Here is the corner room where you can store your seasonal wardrobe and recreational equipment. Here are the laundry machines that (most of the time) work.” The pull-cord lights cast narrow penumbras, so the realtor prefers to do the negotiating outside in the sunlight. Even after the anticlimactic tour-end rental agreements are signed, people choose to stay, for however long a time. 

The space fills up with kayaks and bikes and air conditioning units in precarious formations like pieces of modern art. The room is covered in the same even layer of dust aside from the well-worn paths to the laundry and the breaker box. 

Occasionally someone runs down in slippers and shorts with a single screw in hand, searching the abandoned workshop wall for another to match it. They forget to be scared of the dark corners of the room that is so much larger than the portion of the building they live in. They are so focused on the task at hand, that little scurrying bodies in those corners go unnoticed. 

Some things don’t avoid the space. Spiders drape the ceiling with their bunting, generations of them come and go in the span of a tenant’s stay. Mice find the weak spot in walls where dirt meets cement floor. They stay out of the winter chill, safe as long as they don’t venture to better lit places. 

The ones who visit most are paid to, the handymen (they are nearly all men) who come prepared to spend time in what has settled in the bottom of this old house. Their uniform is jeans stained past repair, and dark t-shirts decorated with dried paint and fresh sweat. They spend hours in the basement on their knees unclogging pipes, fiddling with pilot lights. The task at hand holds their attention too much to notice anything else. 

The landlord would never notice. His head is too full of to-do lists and mortgages to see the space as anything other than a liability. To him, every box has Schrödinger scrawled on the side: his responsibility if it’s lost, his burden if it’s left behind. He only visits when the preliminary fixes don’t solve like they should. When every breaker switch has been flipped back and forth and the lights still won’t turn on upstairs. The dark corners don’t make his heart race. He fears appliances so far gone that he has to pry open his checkbook. 

Every now and then someone comes down in desperation. They take things that look valuable. They do something with them up above. Sell them, destroy them, use them to pedal away into the night. It’s weeks before the person who owns it comes looking, and circles the space again and again, hoping for some clue to where their precious thing went. They will eventually go back upstairs, feet a little slower on the stairs, phone in hand, telling someone they “won’t believe what just happened.” 

But one day, someone comes downstairs for nothing at all. They set up their easel, lay out a few paints, and sit in the corner they previously claimed with their holiday decorations. Under the small lamp and the narrow strip of light coming from the hopper window, they create something that didn’t exist until right now. They aren’t afraid of the noises as the house settles, or the sound of other living things existing. They are content with a few square feet to exist outside of their allotment. They bring a beauty to the dim space that it hasn’t seen since it was used to store root vegetables and apples and canned jars of delicious things in winter. 

So the space endeavors to give something back, to be included in something beautiful, an acknowledgment that it does not only exist for utilitarian things. 

It is stone and mortar but it has sustained many lives. It holds the water, the heat, the insulation that keeps out the frost. It creates space for people’s pasts: photos of children in the arms of long gone parents, love letters from flames that flickered out. The crate of records with old ballads forever etched in their grooves; memorializing applause from hands that held crystal stemware in a jazz club one lucky night, since twisted with arthritis and time. 

​It’s the foundation, the good bones, the intricate organ unseen inside the body.

As the artist hums to herself, pulling her brush across the canvas and tapping it against her lip, the room shimmers with energy. Energy drawn from the couple who cried in the bathroom together when the test finally showed a plus sign. Strength from the girl who decided that winter would end eventually, and she wanted to be alive when it did. Life from the bodies that danced in a living room on the last day of the year, buzzing with positivity for the future, planting kisses on the closest mouth. 

​The energy twists and grows, a little tremor that sounds like a misloaded washing machine to people upstairs, but quakes enough to nudge the tube of paint closest to the table’s edge. It teeters, then tips over the side, momentum taking it under a shelf that hasn’t been moved in decades. The clatter of foil makes the artist jump. But she recovers, and gently sets her palette on the table. She kneels down, one cheek almost touching the cool floor. She sees a glint of the metal tube in the fading evening light, and then something behind it, opening wider, deeper, glittering with life. The sound of the settling old home is a contented sigh.

by Emilie Dawson

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