The sun strokes every inch of my neighborhood. The clean cut houses look absolutely perfect and orderly. All are generally exact copies of the other. Sure there are different flags or flowers, or maybe one house was built with bricks and another with stones, but each house has the same pristine look to it. It can get quite boring walking through the neighborhood. There's not much to look at unless there's a holiday. Even then, most houses put up the same decorations.
"Oh Janice, I found these wonderful little lights at that store down the road. They look just absolutely perfect." Next thing you know, every other house on each block has those lights hanging in their windows.
But there's this one house. Whoever dares to walk past it risk cutting themselves on thrones from an endless barricade of bushes that somehow never bare any leaves. Various trees peak through the bushes, their spindly branches reaching out, sinisterly inviting us in to rescue them from their unkempt imprisonment. Leaves that crunch under your feet like scattered bones cake the entire vicinity  year round. The door is barely visible for it is covered by three towering pine trees lined up like soldiers refusing to move, protecting the house from anything that breathes within a yard of it. Vegetation appears out of thin air and encase the house in a cage of thin, bony, finger-like vines holding the inhabitant in their grasp. 
The inhabitant.
The only inhabitant.
I can't describe him, for I have never met him. I have never seen him.
He's never walked outside or been as neighborly as anyone one else. There was never a chance to say hello or be polite. He was a mystery to the entire neighborhood. I have always believed that house to be lifeless.
And now it truly is.
A couple of weeks ago, an ambulance passed by our house and stopped at the corner late at night. The next day I woke up to the news that the man who lived in that overgrown house had died from a heart attack.