He approached the house with the familiarity of years. Apprehension of the unknown seemed to envelope the tick tock. He gobbled up the sight with one walloping whoosh, a roving eye here and a lazy one there.
A shoal of mud had formed around the door, which when pushed open, creaked open like a cranky baby who had woken up in a midsummer nightmare. The doors were rigid, no longer the greased and oiled toyfor a kid to swing upon them like a monkey.
Was it this wooden plank that he had held on, was it this that had borne the devil of his weight?
The house had a warm mushy stale air smell. The rancid breath of a corpse, one that was being exhumed. The floor felt familiar, and yet dead.
The water had run dry in the kitchen taps. The sink had years of grime and was frigid with its own dull sludge. Like a song which is humming in the head, words seemingly were unstuck - the whole place felt like a ghost had once lived here, strains of memory were trying to make the dots connect, and yet he felt a stranger's presence.
The air refused to know him, the creaky door had not been all that welcoming, the kitchen no longer wanted to feed him, the bathrooms had long forgotten his body, the porch seemed a total stranger, the windows were brown bald and broken, the bed was decaying and was suffering from dementia. The whole house seemed to be like one victim of Alzheimer's, stuck in wonder and nether land.
A few minutes later, feeling completely alien he trudged back towards the outside. As he was passing by the passage that led to the door, on the floor lay a large broken mirror, the shard similar in shape to a disfigured lightening. As he glanced in, he could see his own face in the brown recesses of the mirror - and that was the moment he realised that there was at least one familiar thing in this house.
Unable to deal with that intimacy, he scurried out to his car trying hard to forget the man in the mirror.
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