Watching the House Burn, Backwards

The return of backwards fun! See previous entries here.

The idea is to take a small work and reverse the sentence order. This story I've done this with this time is Watching the House Burn, another from Thinly Sliced Raw Fish, found here.

So, here’s the new “backwards” story:

You clutch my hand, won’t let us leave. We don’t believe in this stuff. We’ve come here since childhood, stealing kisses in the shadows. I stare, transfixed, think I see silhouettes, black snakes of smoke moving uphill through bare trees.  We watched the flames, screaming demons eating oxygen.  The house sat on the grounds of either a prison cemetery, a typhoid-ravaged boarding school, or an abandoned psychiatric hospital.  Every other family moves in, stays awhile, abruptly leaves.   A psycho father kills his family, hangs himself.   For years we talked about its history.  We watched the house burn, holding hands.

The original:

We watched the house burn, holding hands. For years we talked about its history.  A psycho father kills his family, hangs himself.  Every other family moves in, stays awhile, abruptly leaves.  The house sat on the grounds of either a prison cemetery, a typhoid-ravaged boarding school, or an abandoned psychiatric hospital.  We watched the flames, screaming demons eating oxygen.  I stare, transfixed, think I see silhouettes, black snakes of smoke moving uphill through bare trees.  We’ve come here since childhood, stealing kisses in the shadows. We don’t believe in this stuff. You clutch my hand, won’t let us leave.