Room

On the outside it didn’t look that different and the creaky brown door was still holding. After 20 years it didn’t really want to move and when it did it made a noise like a cat begging for food. The smell of old, undisturbed dust inundated any nostrils brave enough to enter the room and the lack of mold was surprising, but than again it didn’t really rain anymore in this part of the world.

The ceiling was partially caved in and gave a ghostly aura to the whole room. Contributing hard to this feeling were the peeling walls with paint chips standing up, looking ready to shred flesh. The flaky paint would crumble at the softest touch of course.

The were a few characters full of personality in the room, beginning with the broken down, faux leather, couch that had cupped more buttocks than a LA rapper. The dresser with the broken open drawers looked like it was addressing the rest of the room and it had a lot say.

The main protagonist was, definitely, the table by the windows. With its narrow straight long legs that went all the way up to the fantastic table top, this little laminated MDF piece of history had everything. All the original details, the squareness, the flimsiness, the featurelessness, were still there and they spoke of people and times when money was few but family and friends mattered.

The food and drink stains, visible through the dust, speckled the table like a universe with black holes, absorbing each other and merging into bigger ones. The chipped, empty, toppled-over vase on top of the table, looked like a painting some dutch master should have painted but they never did.

One of the white framed windows was cracked but they held just fine and you could still, kinda, see through them.

It didn’t matter what was outside the windows. It’s all just dust.