Rarely is my sister seen against the backdrop of my bedroom. But there she stood small and foreign, against the highrise ceiling. The door she had left ajar. A bad omen, for unwelcomed guests good.  Always watching the handles turn. It has only been a few seconds, where her bare foot trodden is still warm. I still have time to shut the door.

 

“-- Shut the door” 

My impatience is justified, though only if others realise - thump -

 

“Have you heard of the devil’s rocking chair?”

 

Kids like to do subtraction, unaccountable are their attractions, in their little head the abstractions. She gave the rocking chair her patience. Transfixing it till it became more than: dark wood, slate blue upholstery, perpetually vacant. Unlike the figurines, books and printed worksheets this rocking chair wasn’t mine. I loathed it for its alien existence, a lingering remnant of the landlord. Its fabric undoubtedly was washed far more times than I would have sat upon it, it wouldn’t smell of me, and definitely not the old owners anymore. It belonged nowhere, wasn’t nowhere, is here. 

 

This room, now my little cell, had been the guest bed room. Maybe I had always been the proper guest, on an overdue stay. Of all the traveling strangers who slept as dead; as I did; at the end of day, bade consciousness farewell against this foreign bed. The bedding changed, but the tiles on the floor didn’t, and the past has a habit of lodging underneath the nails. Beneath the nails which redug our coffins. The same nails that fastened my hopes.