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| Next | Back | Home | Fiction | Non-Fiction | Poems | Book Excerpts | "Trapped
in This Lonely Room" It was a lazy Sunday in mid-April in the town of Abington, a small suburb in the western part of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The weather was calm this day with a light breeze and chill to it, blowing through the neighborhood. There was one house in particular on a block scattered with tall trees that was to have been sold to a young couple but for a sad reason the deal fell through. No one could have guessed just by looking from the outside of this one house what was transpiring at that very moment on the second floor. If one were to have looked up to the double windows on the second floor, one would only see a slightly opened pair of white blinds with darkness between the slightly opened slits which were concealing a sequence of events taking place. This was hidden from the eyes of an oblivious neighborhood.
A man in his early thirties, Michael Lowery, was getting to
meet his impossibly unforeseen pain head on. He had made up his mind
the day before to confront his incomprehensible, forced upon by
circumstances, place in life that fate had put him in. This was a man
with very little baggage, a man who dealt with most of the crises in
his life instead of leaving them to interfere with his life allowing
things to happen where he could easily put the blame on his issues.
There was a deep profound sadness about this man. Michael Lowery was a
man trapped in this lonely room sitting against the back of an old
wooden rocker in the center of the room, lost in his own world.
Something was terribly disturbing about this scene. For the past two
hours he's stared out of his window which was partially covered by a
set of blinds which only left enough room to peer through and out the
window. Bright sunlight seeped in through the blinds which could be
considered bad for the eyes, but for this man with his apathetic
mindset to the world, there was no such consideration. He was lost,
almost trapped by a severe case of emotional drought. Nothing could
arouse in this man any desire to heed the slowly deteriorating state
of his well being.
A creaking sound was made by the right leg of the chair and
then was followed by a louder sound from the slightest movement and
redirecting of pressure from the back of the chair. Something
had momentarily awaken in him a minute twinge of emotion, enough for
him to assert his attention towards something between the window he
was looking out and the window to the left of it.
It was a dangling set of rosary beads which stayed in place by
a high set nail almost measuring up to the top of the windows. To the
normal onlooker it would seem nothing of any consequence other than
the religious symbolic meaning entwined within this tool of spiritual
communication and worship. It had pulled such a strong emotional tug
as to grasp his complete attention. "The good times we'll miss out on," he
thought. Another creek upon the floorboards and now a counter
clockwise motion of the
chair as it was directed to the west wall. Now this time his attention
was turned to what seemed to be a plate with a design of a boat in
rough waters emblazoned upon it. "Julia………..," spoke this wretched
shadow of a man. He sat in his seat with his eyes transfixed upon the
plate for ten thought-intense
filled minutes. With a freshly shed tear run down his cheek he
repositioned his chair to the north wall focusing his attention this
time to a Polaroid of a mother-to-be in a rocking chair with a smile
stretched across her face from cheek to cheek.
"What did the cruel fates have against our
happiness?!" he screamed to the wall
with more tears now in full flow running down his face. "It was
just the beginning of our lives together and you and our child were
taken from me with not even a second thought." A knock upon the door broke up the silence that had
long since enveloped the
room. The man's attention was once again diverted, this time to the
door. A forceful swing of the door revealed a woman of middle age with
a look of disgust and then sympathy for the man. "Michael, why are you doing this to yourself?
You need to grieve for them but, why
torture yourself like this?" Her eyes moved clockwise from the north wall around
the room and back again,
taking into view, the photo, the plate, and the rosary beads, and
finally, a garter which had long since been removed from Michael's
rearview mirror in his car. "I have no more words for you just honest
sympathy and commiseration. Take all
the time you need to say your good-byes. I'll be back out in the car
waiting for you." The woman went back to her car so Michael could say
his good-byes to the house. He
and his new family were to move into it before the complications
during his wife's labor consumed the dream, his wife, and his baby who
it was revealed by a sonogram three weeks earlier to have been their
son. He wasn't one to brood over his problems in his life, but it was just that the pain was so great, almost overwhelming. Fate had taken away his wife and soon to be born son. He had to do what he could to help the pain subside. He couldn't find anything to account for his bad luck and had a hard time dealing with it. His last visit to the house which housed all his dreams, 106 Jayhawk Road, offered a spiritual salve to his pain. The
End Scott
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