I forcefully wriggled myself out from the armchair.
That was where I had spent the night, immersed in the dreams of the past.
The blinking, uncaring numbers on the mobile device dutifully informed me:
12:00.
It was already noon out there.
In here, the darkness reigned supreme.
The shutters filtered the reality, allowing the free passage to the occasional shade from time to time.
Those stygian shadows embraced me with possessive tenderness. Heavy as lead, yet delicate as a membrane.
They protected me from the outside world, from the newly conceived solitude.
I crept around my childhood home like a sleepwalker, dragging my feet in bunny slippers, mumbling a mantra in my mind:
Don't stop. Stopping means thinking.
Keep walking. Johnny Walker.
The hostile sooty mirror abruptly intercepted my hunched frame. After the unexpected ambushy assault, it then hurled the grenade of my reflection back at me.
I paused before it, unwillingly.
There was just something about those chestnut-brown eyes that bugged me. Something equally familiar and foreign.
I leaned forward to take a closer look.
That was when it hit me. They were her eyes, too.
I slipped off the edge of their auburn irises and flew to meet my demise, falling into the darkness of their pupils.
The air filled with fragments of memories pulled me all the way to the lowermost point of the chasm.
When I looked again, but a moment later, I could see my own contorted, broken body at the bottom of the abyss.
Splayed, unmoving.
The surrounding silence stepped towards it.
It began to wolf down my flesh and bones with gusto.
I wanted to scream.
Wail.
Do anything, just to interrupt my descent down its beastly belly of muteness.
I cried for her, called her to come to my aid as any frightened child would.
But that was useless.
She was not here anymore.
She could not hear me anymore.
I was utterly, irrevocably alone in this world.
It was up to me, and me only, to tear my gaze from the mangled visage of the Mirror of Erised.
Harry. It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live.
With the last atom of my strength, I propelled myself away from the silvery shimmering surface.
I inched myself along towards the window, instead.
The sphynx-like curtains were its mute guardians. They wielded puzzling swords whose questions I was presently not able to decipher.
A stray ray of sunlight seemed to have somehow thievishly sneaked into the room.
It illuminated the motes of dust that floated in the air, suspended in the circusy sunbeam.
The specky acrobates clambered the golden rope, spiralled upwards, descended, danced madly!
Even those lifeless shapes had more energy in them than me.
I thought how I only had to raise my hand a little more to push the drapes wide open.
Just a few centimetres, it seemed.
Let the day and life enter the house.
I could not.
Mom used to do it.
***
A/N: 28.2.2015. Music theme song: Rammstein: "Ohne Dich."
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Tiny Tales | ✔️
Short StoryThis book is a collection of numerous short stories I have created, both mini and midi ones, written in the period of the past twenty years. Some of them are award-winning entries in various micronarrative competitions. Others were adapted with the...
