Original Prompt, Week 1

In Michael W. Cox’s essay "Visitor," the narrator tells us about a young boy that his father kept in the outdoor basement, and the story focuses on the young boy, Jody, and the room in which he stays and the narrator’s speculations on what transpires in the basement. The room in which the boy stayed was where the narrator and his brother would play, and the narrator describes the room as being “like an indoor tree house” with dirt and wooden planks on the floor and an old couch, where the narrator imagined Jody would sleep. When the narrator first encounters him, Jody asks him to retrieve him a couple of sandwiches and asks him questions in regards to the events within the house: “You eat good inside there?” In addition, the narrator speculates throughout the essay what Jody goes through/does: “Maybe he’d read books and would remember them, or see, in his mind, TV shows he’d already seen[…]” Their relationship seems to be built upon wondering what happens to each other in rooms they cannot look in.

Prompt: Write an essay fixated on or around a specific room without you actually being in the room. What do you see enter and/or leave the room? Use creative reasoning to reflect and juggle possible events that may or may not have transpired based upon what you have seen.