A Daemon's Babble

Doors of Shutters

A/N~ Looking back on this, it's longer than most of my pieces. It also has a sort of lilting writing style. It was originally meant to be a prologue to a story, but I scrapped the idea and now it can stand alone.

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My earliest memory isn’t anything memorable. It wasn’t odd, or strange, or happy, or violent. It wasn’t the sort of thing you’d tell at parties, or gush to your friends about at school. Parents didn’t coo over it, and it wasn’t anything embarrassing. My earliest memory is of a woman at a library.

There was nothing remotely special about her, nothing that would stick in your brain, nothing that would make little kids pull at their mother’s sleeves to make them look. It was just, plainly and simply, a woman. I was four, I believe, and I was sitting on the rug in the children’s section of the county library. I remember vividly that the rug was red and that it had a yellow ring around it with the ABC’s in it. I was sitting in the green circle right in the middle. It looked like a rather colorful target, and there was a lamp swinging from the ceiling, bright and golden, always swinging back and forth from the gentle breeze from the AC, like a bowman who couldn’t decided where to aim his arrow. I don’t know why I remember that so vividly, when I was reading a book, a book about horses, but I remember the feel of the rug and the way I was annoyed at how the light would sometimes miss my book and make me pause in my reading. I don’t remember the woman walking into the library, considering that the children’s section was opposite from the checkout counter, but I remember looking up from my book and debating on moving because of the stupid light. That’s when I saw the woman.

Like I said earlier, there was nothing special about this woman. She had brown hair that fell to her shoulders and sort of stuck up in every direction and had one curl that was poised above her head, perfectly still, as if she had styled it that way. She looked like she’d just rolled out of bed. I think she was wearing tan shorts, but I don’t remember what her shirt was, or I just didn’t see it, because she was wearing this sort of bright scarlet shawl. I remember, oddly enough, that for a brief moment in time I thought it was Little Red Riding Hood. Her back was to me, and she was talking to the receptionist. She wasn’t necessarily being quiet about it either, and neither was the receptionist. The receptionist all these years later still works there, but she doesn’t even remotely remember the lady in the red shawl. The woman had been laughing about something as the receptionist rung up her books, and then the receptionist asked her how her day had been. The lady had responded and told her that her day had been just wonderful, that she had bought new hurricane shutters, and that her house hadn’t been flooded from last night’s storm. The receptionist had seemed a little confused about that, I don’t know why, but she put on her kindly smile and just told the woman that was fantastic. The woman had then swooped up her books into her arms and began to saunter away, flashing a grin towards the receptionist. I remember that she had been humming ‘London Bridge’ to herself, and I had shut my book suddenly, no longer interested, and she had turned towards the sound. Funnily enough, I don’t remember her face. I remember her eyes were a sort of light green though, very, very pale, an almost pastel color. They weren’t odd eyes; I had seen people with different color eyes, much more interesting eyes, and hers weren’t anything interesting. I don’t know why, but I felt as if she was really looking at me, and this is sort of a morbid analogy to associate with such a normal woman, but I felt that she was trying to rip me open and look into my soul, probe into my thoughts, see what was inside of me, all with her eyes. Then she had waved at me. I don’t remember waving back, but she just walked out.

Just walked right out, as if she somehow just didn’t make a huge impression on me, as if she didn’t understand how unnerving her eyes were, as if she was just a completely normal woman. As if.