Red Windowpane

The stench was overpowering, a potent cocktail of rotting fish, bird droppings and dead rats that filled the shuttered room. I cannot recall having ever smelt anything to compare to aroma of that little place. I reeled back, banging into the porter behind me. I felt like retching, but I quelled the feeling lest my mother decide to go somewhere else.

For I loved that room, I really loved it. The smell could knock a bouncer flat, and if vegetables were to be grown there they would flourish for the very air was fertiliser, but I loved it. Recovering, I rushed inside to say hello to my old friend.

He was exactly where he had been when I left him last, sitting hunched on a pile of rotting crates, gazing out over the sinking city as he always did. Bugger was his name, on account of his habit of screaming the word amidst a flutter of feathers and talons whenever he was disturbed from his perch.

After greeting him with a cocked head and click of my teeth, which he returned, we sat together upon the crates.

While my family set down our gear and tidies what they could, my friend and I sat and watched, looking through the cracked red window at the city that was sinking, slowly, beneath the waves.

Author's Note

Another of my little exercise pieces. I have had an experience similar to this, but the actual story is fictional. Thoughts?

Reviews

[roarke]

I like this moment. You reveal only so much for the reader to fit the pieces together and then individually speculate about the rest of the scene and characters. Nice concept.

[A Modern Hippy]

Thank you. It's one of my simpler pieces, for sure.