Story - 1

This is my first attempt at writing a story. Actually the story was started by a different person. It was a really nice start, and it spurred me on to do something with it. Hope it is atleast worth your time.

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In the afternoon I was feeling a little dull and a little achy, and so I wandered into the only unchanged room of the house. Dust had collected on the shelves, on the books, on the odds and ends riddled about the dresser top. For two years, the calendar had said December 2009, and the ID card of the boy who once lived there has sat alone, a little smirk in the picture of his face smiling back at anyone who examines it.
The rest of the room for most part remained untouched. Most of his toys sat on his desk covered in a blanket of dust. Their sheen fading slowly as they lay in wait to feel the warmth of a human hand. His desk was positioned in front of a small window overlooking the backyard fencing the house from the vast woods. An endless array of trees stood in the open, branches drooping under the weight of snow, stripped bare, and left outside to bear the burden of the harsh cold winds and the unforgiving winter. The view did not provide me any respite from the way I was feeling. The trees reminded me too much of my myself lonely, cold and sober.

I turned away from the window, and walked to the shelf behind me. A picture of his family was the most prominent piece on his shelf. It was the picture of a little boy standing in front of his sand castle proud of his creation, with his parents standing next to him hugging their son. You could easily make out how much he meant to his parents from the way they looked at him.

Next to the picture few soldiers were standing guard. They looked a bit rusty , but their spirit had not diminished one bit as they still held on to their positions. One could barely make out the names of the book behind them with all the dust.

The books were lazily piled together. A few books leaned against the left wall forming a small tunnel, and some had fallen off and piled on top of each other. As I moved more towards the left, something flashed my eye. I went back to take a closer look at the tunnel and I could notice a faint sparkle.

I put my hand inside and took the object out. It was a shoe. It was a pink slip-on girls shoes with a small crystal bow on top. The shoe was simple but very pretty. It seemed to belong to a girl around the same age as him.

Its not the first time, but I have tried, tried very hard. Despite my best efforts, I have never been able to understand boys. I have wasted countless hours wondering what goes on in their head. Why they do the things they do. All that wondering and thinking has convinced me that I’ll never understand. Nothing they do will surprise me anymore. What this shoe was doing here? I knew I will never be able to guess. But I really didn’t care.

Suddenly I felt something bump against my foot. I looked down, and a key laid short distance away from my foot. It must have fallen from the shoe. How naïve, to hide a key in a shoe. I put the shoe back. I picked up the key and looked around the room to find the door this key would unlock.

I moved back to the table and moved the chair aside. The light from the sun had finally managed to pierce a hole through dense fluffy clouds. Even as the light desperately tried to hold on to the ground, the clouds had already started to overpower the light again. A little of that light was beaming through the window, directly onto the table. This had brightened up the room considerably.

I went down on my knee and unlocked the drawer. I tried to pull it out, but it was stuck. It was expressing its displeasure for being abandoned. After pleading with it for a couple times, I mustered all my strength and pulled the drawer hard, it came out with a loud screeching noise. There were some stationary articles on the top, couple of comics, some paper and a rectangular box at the far corner. The box interested me. I pulled the box out and put all the other stuff back into the drawer and closed the drawer.

The box resembled the dimensions of a wooden chess set. I blew the dust off of its face and kept the box back on the table, waiting for the dust to settle down.

“Sara, could you please come down. Your phone has been ringing for the past 15 minutes. Looks like somebody wants to talk to you desperately”.

“Ok Mom, I’m coming”, I replied. “Looks like you will have to wait for a while”, I muttered to the box, took it in my hand, and walked down.
to be continued…