Hookah-smoking caterpillar

As James stepped down into the basement, he could hear creaking around from upstairs, knowing that everyone was starting to move about. Either that or they had ghosts, truth be told the whole business with the wishes had changed his perspective on these things. Did ghosts actually exist?

Now?

Who knew...?

He could hear more creaking as it sounded like his sisters were also up. Imagining the zombie-like state they were probably in, he smiled as he went downstairs.

In the basement, the exposed pipes made it easy to hear the vibration of rushing water as his sisters started their showers. It was why he had gotten up and dressed earlier than normal.

If he woke at the same time as his sisters, he would have had to wait for the shower, and since they all took their time, when it was finally his turn, there would have been no hot water left.

As he stepped onto the bare concrete floor, he breathed in the stale, dusty smell of forgotten and discarded items. He imagined his sisters would eventually head outside to swim and work on their tan.

‘At least it will be cool inside,’ he thought smugly. ‘Let them bake in this weather.’

He grinned noting that the outside temperature is still in the low 70s, but by the time that his sisters got outside, it would likely be in the high 70s and reach 80 by noon.

Fortunately for him, the basement would remain cool enough to work in throughout the day. Even if the central air-conditioning vents weren’t open to control humidity, the furnace’s air-return would suck in any moist air and draw in the dry cool air from upstairs.

As James walked to the piles of items and looked around, he wrinkled his nose. Over a decade’s worth of shit that everyone had crammed down here was covered with dust. His original self would have taken one look at the mess, balked at it and given it all up as a bad job. However, the wishes had made him practically OCD, so with his laser focused efforts he found it easy to get to work. The adult in him knew that the smart approach would be to survey the basement and decide what needed to be done. A teenager would jump into clearing the boxes, which would be a rookie mistake.

Before, James would go upstairs and grab paper and a pencil to start a list. Now, with his improved memory, he could remember the list and write it out later. James slowly walked through the basement to take an inventory of the needed changes. Looking around, he noted an unfinished basement used as a dump/storage area, the furnace and hot water heater and a laundry sink. Along the one wall were a series of small windows that if cleaned, would let in a lot of morning light.

He knew that his dad wouldn’t pay for the materials so he could build walls to privacy and to cut down the noise from the furnace, much less a bathroom. But he could use old sheets to cover the windows and build a privacy partition as a stopgap. If he decided that it was advantageous to move down here permanently, then he could work on getting the money to build proper walls. Thank god he was in the 1990s where the city wouldn’t send in inspectors for every change. That was something he would not miss. The problem was that the stopgap approach of using old sheets had a lot of drawbacks, with the sheets collecting a lot of dust, not addressing the noise from the furnace and the looks. The more he thought about it, it made sense for him to move down here. His sisters would appreciate the freedom to run around half dressed as Bill was never home and he would be two floors below. All he needed was a way to convenience his dad that a little money to fix the place up would go a long way. He thought of several approaches and selected one that should work. He would just need his mother to sign on to his plan.

Now that he had a plan, it’s on to the piles of “treasures”.

“Oh sweet summer child,” James quoted with a grin, as he got started on the first pile.

The only trouble was, James did not know just how much time it would take to sort through everything. He simply started from the top and worked his way down. This pile seemed to be filled with miscellaneous camping and travel gear.

He found an old Boy Scout pocket knife in one box, along with some assorted camping equipment. He stuck the knife in his pocket and set aside the box. However, most of it was stuff that they didn’t need, like damaged tents or unusable things there was only one of, like half a set of skis he had broken and chucked away.

The lone remaining ski had made its way downstairs, instead of the garbage.

After realizing just how much trash was there, it was clear that the regular trash bags that he brought would not cut it.

He headed back upstairs to grab a box of black leaf bags from the garage and went back down and resumed his work. He methodically filled each bag with as much rubbish as he could, before taking the bags—two at a time—up to the garage and temporarily storing them there until he could put them out Sunday evening.

He picked up a few particular boxes with taped lids he had found at the bottom of the first pile and took them to his room.

Using his pocket knife, he cut the tape on one box and lifted the flap. Underneath, he found glossy magazines filed away like comic books that he remembered seeing at shops. He pulled one out and found a beautiful woman with big breasts in a glamorous pose on the cover.

He grinned and thought, ‘Yup, it’s Dad’s porn stash.’

Originally, it wasn’t until one of his trips back home from college that he had come across his father’s stash of adult magazines and porno tapes. The internet and porn websites were already fully in swing by then, and things like nude magazines and VHS porn tapes had already become relics of the past.

Like most young people of his generation and those that followed, he dismissed most old things as obsolete, useless trash and left it in the basement. When his parents divorced, everything in the basement was cleaned out and thrown away.

James briefly looked through the magazines and noted that some of them were from the fifties and sixties.

‘Heh, some of these must actually be Grandpa Smith’s,’ he corrected himself. He paused, looking at one cover, and smiled. ‘Nice tits,’ he mused and placed the magazines back into the box.

No doubt Dad had forgotten about them and hadn’t felt the urge to look at them after he started getting real college pussy regularly, hence the taped up lids.

He put the boxes away on the mostly unused top shelf of his closet. With his memories, he had little use for the pictures as fodder for masturbation or the articles as entertainment. He had simply rescued them for two reasons: nostalgia and value, but mostly value. Who knew now that in twenty years they would become collectables especially in good, well-preserved condition?

There were still more piles of sundry items to go through, so James headed back downstairs.

People generally have one of two default responses to things that they no longer want or use: they toss them away or keep them for various reasons. His parents clearly defaulted to the latter. Even if they had tried to box up all the small items, the sheer amount of it was daunting.

Thank God the Wishes had allowed him to tune his focus.

Items varied in condition. For clothing, he could tell when his sisters and he were going through a growth spurt, as the clothing seemed almost new.

He remembered that many women that he knew complained about how quickly their young ones went through clothing. One of his coworkers had complained that kids seemed to outgrow some clothing by the time they had made it back home. The ones in good condition were folded and stacked in an empty carton for his Mom to sort through.

Toys usually didn’t always fare as well as clothing. There were cars with missing wheels and dolls with missing limbs.

Wryly, he observed his sisters had not left the discarded Barbie dolls with any dignity and abandoned them without a shred of clothing, probably because they had other dolls that could fit them. More than half of the toys found went into trash bags.

James did find an old Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle and grinned, it was orange so that meant it was Michelangelo.

“Cowabunga,” James quipped and placed the Turtle on a shelf.

Every single baby item that James and his sisters had used as infants seemed to be at the bottom of the piles of bags and boxes. From clothes to strollers and toys, there were enough items to account for most of their early childhood consumption. These things were undoubtedly not cheap and seemed to be of good quality and state for their age. He found a box and placed all of them neatly into the box, taped it up, and placed it on the side; he acquired another box and repeated the process. This would come in handy if any of them had kids in the near future. He made a mental note to bring a marker so he could label the boxes.

Or Karen would probably want to either donate them or sell them in a “garage sale” to other mothers in the neighborhood. Therefore, these items had to be roughly categorized and condensed into as few boxes as he could, for her to go through.

Fortunately, his parents had preferred large plastic storage bins, so they were easier to reuse, organize, and stack for this purpose. Still, he was barely through a quarter of the items by the time lunch came around and they sent his twin sister downstairs to retrieve him.

“James, you down here?”

He stuck his head up from the boxes and wiped the sweat off.

“I’m your huckleberry,” James said quoting Doc Holliday from Tombstone, Amanda paused, frowned and shook her head in amusement.

“Mom says lunch is ready.”

“Thanks, I’ll be up in a minute.”

She nodded and left him to it, he finished tidying some stuff up and headed up to the bedroom, where he swapped out for some clean clothing that wasn’t covered in dust and went to the bathroom to wash his face.

As it was already getting hot, Karen had prepared a salad for everyone, Bill grumbled about it, but James took his plate, thanked her, did a quick grace, and dug in. Rachael sat down opposite James and gave him a look.

She wore jeans and a light top that showed off some cleavage. God no wonder he started cracking boners over his sisters. He had a flash of imagery in his mind as he remembered when she pulled her top off to show him her implants and the big nipples that he got to lick and sighed.

“Something on your mind string bean?”

He blinked away the memory and looked at her with a grin, a weird one that she could not decipher as he shrugged “Many things Rach.”

She inclined her head, Amanda sat next to him, wearing an equally thin top that did little to hide her puffy nipples and he sighed, Cheryl also sat next to him but she wore a less revealing top and it looked like she had a bra on.

He looked at her and she smiled, and he inclined his head. He remembered her grinding against him and his face pressed against her rack. At one point in time or another he had seen all the women in his family naked, it was no wonder he was a wreck when he left and not able to do anything about it other than masturbate. James quickly became aware of his growing tumescence and thought of his dad in a bikini and snorted and got a look from Amanda.

“What,” she asked him.

He thought it wise not to comment just yet, but had to explain something and simply stated and said: “Dad in a bikini?”

She blinked and choked a cough as Karen walked over and handed out the plates and sat down, Bill’s opening shot was:

“I’ve got another game tonight.”

“Again,” Karen asked with a sigh.

“In vino veritas,” James mumbled. Bill blinked at James, “What?” “In wine there is truth.”

Karen frowned as she sat down, “What do you mean?”

James twitched.

“Are you sure you want to go there?”

She shrugged, “You opened up the conversation.”

“Don’t get angry with me.”

She nodded, “I make no promises I cannot keep.”

“Touché,” he chuckled. “So In vino veritas means in wine there is truth.”

“So you said.”

“I guess dad doesn’t want to spend time at the house, be around the family, he’d rather spend his time whiling away the hours with his drinking buddies, playing poker, and chatting shit about this and that?”