Alternate Universe: Clapboard

The little house everyone calls it. My great-grandfather's house. I don't remember him. What I remember – the sagging empty house, a dusty seven-up bottle (he always gave me seven-up, I remember that) and one boot sprawled on the floor. The sole worn through at the ball. Two grey mice with pale, fine hands scurry round and round through the mouth of the boot, out the hole. Squeeking like a willow in wind. All around the house, overgrown ferns and orange poppies with their black-dusted hearts, bent from heavy rain. The smell of forgetting ....

About the alternate
universe. I picked "clapboard" as a visual word for this one, but it might as easily have been "boot," or "sag." Each to me invokes Dakota, the abandoned country.