The basement of my grandmother's house had one finished room. Just to the left of the bottom stair was a pair of western saloon-style half-doors that swung crooked on creaky hinges. Beyond these, the long, narrow gameroom.

Threadbare, orange carpet covered the floors, and the only piece of furniture in the gameroom was an old recliner that at one time had been covered in green vinyl. Now, the chair was mostly nothing but torn, gray stuffing nailed to a splintered frame that hid sharp upholstery tacks and unruly springs. There was a dartboard, but no darts. Shelves built into the opposite wall held mismatched stacks of playing cards with dog-eared corners, a box of checkers, a chess board, a coconut painted and dressed to look like the head of a pirate, a toy cow that had belonged to my father when he was a boy and that mooed when turned upside down by way of some tiny mechanism in its plastic udder.

But the best part of the gameroom was the bar. With candy cigarettes hanging from our bottom lips, my cousin and I spent hours behind that bar, popping imaginary popcorn in Grandma's old, broken, movie theater-style popcorn maker and serving it to our imaginary patrons, along with "beer" we poured into little plastic pink and yellow tea cups.

Once, when I had no playmates, I set to tending the bar alone. After a few moments of solitary play, I paused to stare out into the cold, unfinished part of the basement. Sudden fear kept my eyes staked to the silent darkness just outside the game room. My lively patrons grew silent, then disappeared altogether, and I was alone. My vivid imagination created a hand, a gnarled and hairy hand that reached around the corner from the bottom of the stairs to flip the light switch off. Over and over, I saw that hand creep into the room. Sometimes it entered high on the wall and slid slowly down until it hit its mark, giving me plenty of time to fear the rest of its monstrous self. Other times, that hand struck the switch so fast I had only enough time to see its shape before the darkness sucked up the room.