Book Nook

A lot of people keep dismembered bodies of their victims under their stairs. Okay, not a lot, but a few. Okay, maybe that's just what I want to believe, but it wasn't what we had underneath the stairs of my parents' house. Behind a door that stuck just the tiniest bit was one of the planet's largest deposits of comic books. They came from various epochs, many of them dating back to my mother's youth, when she lived with her parents behind their drug store in Granby, Colorado. Her position allowed a certain amount of cherry-picking the best of the lot that came through. The best, that is, for her. This amounted to a great many Little Lulus, and an even greater number of Donald Ducks. My mother was not a big fan of superheros, but there were a number of Classics Illustrated to break up some of the more saccharine elements.
These old comics formed the initial layer of what would become an archaeological expedition whenever we ventured inside the ever-narrowing space. We always took a flashlight, since there was no light inside, and we were loathe to take comics out into the wide open spaces of the basement. There was always something more intense about reading page after page in the dim light supplied by two "D" batteries. On top of my mother's magazines, piled mostly in old fruit crates, were the Mad magazines and Spider-man and Archies that came from the next generation. There was always a mix going on, with old books being pulled up to the surface while the newer ones drifted back to the bottom. Months or years might pass before you saw that issue of The Avengers again, but it was always a satisfying find.
Over the years some Life magazines got added to the flurry, and that meant a potential trip in the way-back machine with pictures of the Kennedy assassination to go along with your Sub-Mariner. It made for hours of what felt like guilty pleasure, but the only thing we were ruining was our eyesight. One or two of us could sit in there for hours at a stretch, re-reading the same comics that we read two years ago, just like they were new. Sometimes when we played hide and seek, we would close ourselves off in the dark, holding our breath, but then wishing that we had the time to do a little reading before someone found us. If we had stayed there as long as we had wanted, maybe there would have been a few corpses underneath those stairs.