A Collection of Short Stories

Decor

I adopted this "problem" during my first celebrated Christmas. My father's business had surprisingly skyrocketed despite the consistent suffrage of empty plates years prior. But because of this recent wave of success we were able to afford lights. My mother took me to the quaint, holiday-themed shop I would always pass on the way to school. It was somehow different on the inside than it was out, in which solid red sponges enclosed the rainbow sun, of course produced by those lights, within four walls. We got those LED Retrofit C7 bulbs; They looked like strawberries painted on a child's activity sheet - multicolored is what I mean. They were unlike anything I had ever seen nor ever had. If I were honest I'd say I was beyond mesmerized. But it's here that I will apologize. The lengthy description of those lights became a concoction of my own embellishments, in other words it was quite unnecessary for the lights were not the source of my "problem" it was the action of hanging them. You see, the act of hanging became an art to me then. The selection and development of style was so intricate and delicate. I developed what my parents called an obsession. 

To the annoyance of my parents, even when Christmas had ended, I arranged and rearranged those lights in my room. In the beginning this occurred on a weekly basis and quickly developed as a daily hobby, so much so that I would skip school. They had told me that they had taken away my lights out of concern and tough love but I didn't believe them. I, although I am embarrassed to admit, scavenged my house for anything I could hang but satisfaction never relieved me. Old photos and posters were tolerable things to hang as decoration but never once were they on par with the beauty of those lights. At this point, my parents left me be. And in this negligence I realized, after some time given to me to ponder, that it was because I wasn't mesmerized by those items as I was by the lights. I needed something , something just as beautiful to me as those lights.

I never found that item in a conventional place. I was walking through the slums of my neighborhood, in those dark alleys whose insidious ambiance never diminished with the night, and that's where I found them: the rats. Their loathed being of beady eyes, disease ridden blood, and grotesque tail came across as rather charming to me. And so I caught them, took them home, and hacked them to bits. Their intestines hung just as well as the lights, their tails made nice bows, and eyes polka dotted , my now red, wall. And the smell...while others would say horrid was a fragrance I grew to love.Some I left whole - choosing to hang them by noose as if they were cascading down in a tidal wave of red or for the purposes of having a nice metronome toy. Finally, that feeling that same feeling which once overtook me returned. I found my new muse for decoration. I snuck rats into my room daily, unaware that the plethora of rats that once were diminished to extinction within a few months. I was erratic. There were no more rats, my muse gone, the fragrance dead. My pleas for a new subject was answered by the soft melody of tears, crying conceived by my mother's belly: Lauren was her name.