[ COACH ] Hope
[ SONG | ARTIST ] Winter Wonderland | Pentatonix
[ WATTPAD WORD COUNT ] 1,455 words
An introduction.
A small glimpse of what’s inside my head.
On the cold and Christmas night of December 24, 1943.
It was a shameful act whether or not the moon was young; whether or not the stars or the clouds had their colliding ideologies on which should rule the skies. Either way, it took me much courage to even blow a sweat on my face. Not the coldness of the night could hide away my fatigue, for days of hard work and hot chocolate.
But here is a confusing fact: I’m not human.
Well, I look like one. I have my limbs and my phalanges. I have human eyes, ears, and nose. I have my feet. I can walk. I can talk. I have my clothes on. I am not invisible, but sweetly, I love hiding away from people. However I am not, technically, human. Even my name doesn’t suit as a human-like name as others.
Death.
A five-letter word normal people will look at terrible as it seems. They always find me dreadful. I’ve tried to be friendly, to be ecstatic and jolly. But they don’t know that what they hate is not me. It is rather my job.
A conclusion.
Someone’s ending.
I took a pivot step towards the street where the house of Fenstermacher was. The streetlights were faint but they were enough to light my way. It seemed like the dogs felt my presence; they sang their barks in different choruses and it wasn’t the best greeting I got from them. The cats gave their feline purr to me, staying up on top of houses yet not averting their look.
Curious.
I just thought humans were the poor beings that time.
A halt. A breeze of cold air.
An old brown door stood in front of me. There was a plate hanging on top of it, reading Willkommen. As hollow as I was, I didn’t knock on the door; rather my body went through it, as if I was a ghost. Though the inside was pure black, it was the blackness of the house that adjusted for my eyes. Colors. And then things. There was nothing sophisticated inside. The hallway extended up to the kitchen. There were two doors leading to rooms in the first floor. There was a wooden staircase leading to the attic.
The first room was where Mr. and Mrs. Fenstermacher slept. I swore to my human heart that I could hear the sweet sound of flute inside Berthold’s mind, even though his guttural snores echoed in the room. Gertrude was an iron-fisted woman, but her soul was the contrary of her outer truth: cheerful and happy.
The other room, which I didn’t bother going to because it was easy to know what its purpose was, was a basement.
Just like the first floor, the attic was dark. But it wasn’t as ornate like it was below. There were fewer domestic things inside. The bright moonlight went beyond the clear window glass of the attic and reached the creaking wooden floor. My steps were light. My breathing wasn’t that composed anymore but I was trying to retain my subtlety. I took a halt when my gape shifted to the being on the bed.
There, just a meter away from the window, a girl was peacefully sleeping on her middling bed. Her only insulation against the harsh cold night was a dull quilt, and her tarnished wooden bed frame completed the feeling of their mediocre life. But it wasn’t the items that plucked my curiosity to her.
It was her aura. Bright yellow. Stunning. Color. Her feelings of love and hope were so great. I wanted to touch the tip of it just to clarify myself that it was hers. Her heart was the size of her small fist but it was her determination and admiration in her life that stood out more.
