Goldilocks
Inspired by the work of the Black Company on fairy tales...
The slightly ajar door was irresistible, too tempting to walk past. Tentatively she pushed it further open, could it be this simple? She called, “Hello?” to the potential listeners…no reply. She closed it behind her, thought again and returned it to the open position she’d found it in, now with her at the other side…
The interior was basic…the living room into which the front door opened carpeted in the deep reds fashionable in the late seventies…well worn…hiding a multitude of stain and spills…she gravitated towards the table covered in used cups housing the remains of elderly coffee, magazines, papers and other detritus from a long Sunday afternoon of nothing important to do. Leafing through the bag left on one of the chairs, she tried to imagine the owner and then realised she wasn’t that interested…she returned it to the chair…ruffled but intact…
She sat down relishing for a moment the dryness and the gradual evaporation of the cold that had become, even in the brief time since she had left, a perpetual and all encompassing blanket. Then she noticed the jacket. Instantly and instinctively she put it on…thick wool…smelling faintly of perfume but mostly smelling clean…somehow it made her feel a little more human…cared for. What had her life come to when inanimate objects were the nearest she got to any sort of comfort?
Without thought she picked up a paper and started to read…none of it really made an impact on her but there was a familiarity in the printed page…idly she read and ate the sweets left open on the table, twisting her blonde hair around her finger. The minutes ticked by unremarkable and unremarked on. She was relieved to be able to slip into a world that made sense…that had normality about it. A relief to ignore that this world wasn’t hers…that she shouldn’t be here…that she had no right…no right to sit at this table, no right to wear this jacket, no right to read, eat or be here…none of that really registered…
Being a stranger in the place she lived wasn’t a new sensation. Perhaps that’s why she didn’t walk straight out of this house…this house owned by strangers… Who knew that one mistake could set a family against each other. One momentary lack of thought could result in a mother who refused to talk to her daughter, a father who couldn’t look at her anymore. A mistake that in the end hadn’t amounted to anything…but by then the damage was done…
Suddenly she was tired…hollowed and weighted with fatigue she walked upstairs…the whole house was dark, the walls painted in deep shades, thick curtains and small windows. It felt like a warm cave, a place to bury herself in, away from the world she had created for herself…the first doorway on the landing invited her into an unmade bed and she let herself sink into it…it welcomed her with warmth and a pleasant musky sent and she gave into it.
Was it really only two days since she had walked to the station…48 hours since she stepped on the first train that arrived at the platform…4 days since the pains that had made all the heartache of the 2 months before pointless. That signaled the end of one nightmare but that couldn’t erase the irrevocable damage to what she used to call home and just 9 weeks since that night when she’d made the stupid mistake of believing in love…
Her eyes closed and she slept the instant sleep of exhaustion that seals the sleeper away from any awareness of noise or movement…that is almost the sleep of the dead…so she didn’t hear the three residents of the house arrive home, didn’t hear the petty bickering about rights and responsibilities in the living room and didn’t see the face of the man as he found a girl he didn’t know asleep in his unmade bed…
The slightly ajar door was irresistible, too tempting to walk past. Tentatively she pushed it further open, could it be this simple? She called, “Hello?” to the potential listeners…no reply. She closed it behind her, thought again and returned it to the open position she’d found it in, now with her at the other side…
The interior was basic…the living room into which the front door opened carpeted in the deep reds fashionable in the late seventies…well worn…hiding a multitude of stain and spills…she gravitated towards the table covered in used cups housing the remains of elderly coffee, magazines, papers and other detritus from a long Sunday afternoon of nothing important to do. Leafing through the bag left on one of the chairs, she tried to imagine the owner and then realised she wasn’t that interested…she returned it to the chair…ruffled but intact…
She sat down relishing for a moment the dryness and the gradual evaporation of the cold that had become, even in the brief time since she had left, a perpetual and all encompassing blanket. Then she noticed the jacket. Instantly and instinctively she put it on…thick wool…smelling faintly of perfume but mostly smelling clean…somehow it made her feel a little more human…cared for. What had her life come to when inanimate objects were the nearest she got to any sort of comfort?
Without thought she picked up a paper and started to read…none of it really made an impact on her but there was a familiarity in the printed page…idly she read and ate the sweets left open on the table, twisting her blonde hair around her finger. The minutes ticked by unremarkable and unremarked on. She was relieved to be able to slip into a world that made sense…that had normality about it. A relief to ignore that this world wasn’t hers…that she shouldn’t be here…that she had no right…no right to sit at this table, no right to wear this jacket, no right to read, eat or be here…none of that really registered…
Being a stranger in the place she lived wasn’t a new sensation. Perhaps that’s why she didn’t walk straight out of this house…this house owned by strangers… Who knew that one mistake could set a family against each other. One momentary lack of thought could result in a mother who refused to talk to her daughter, a father who couldn’t look at her anymore. A mistake that in the end hadn’t amounted to anything…but by then the damage was done…
Suddenly she was tired…hollowed and weighted with fatigue she walked upstairs…the whole house was dark, the walls painted in deep shades, thick curtains and small windows. It felt like a warm cave, a place to bury herself in, away from the world she had created for herself…the first doorway on the landing invited her into an unmade bed and she let herself sink into it…it welcomed her with warmth and a pleasant musky sent and she gave into it.
Was it really only two days since she had walked to the station…48 hours since she stepped on the first train that arrived at the platform…4 days since the pains that had made all the heartache of the 2 months before pointless. That signaled the end of one nightmare but that couldn’t erase the irrevocable damage to what she used to call home and just 9 weeks since that night when she’d made the stupid mistake of believing in love…
Her eyes closed and she slept the instant sleep of exhaustion that seals the sleeper away from any awareness of noise or movement…that is almost the sleep of the dead…so she didn’t hear the three residents of the house arrive home, didn’t hear the petty bickering about rights and responsibilities in the living room and didn’t see the face of the man as he found a girl he didn’t know asleep in his unmade bed…
I enjoyed that very much. :)
ReplyDeleteI'm glad that you did...I enjoyed writing it...
ReplyDelete