One Day(Provisional Title) - Chapter 1
Filename: wm01.html
© 1998 Wai Lun Mo
Length: 870 words
Genre: Fiction
Description:
What five students sharing a house experience over one day.
Weekend
FRIDAY
1.
5.00am
There is something wonderful about waking at this hour. You awake, just as night is eclipsing into day, and just as sleep eclipses into dreaming, and you listen to the silence of the world around you. This is the best part of the day -- the time when you feel that you can do anything.
I was reading by the glow of my table lamp. It carved an arc of yellow over my bed, leaving the rest of my room cloaked in darkness. This was fortunate, because my room looked better that way.
It was a student house and what did I expect anyway, said Kenny when I complained. Nina took it badly, though. She invested the entire first week of semester to vacuuming, dusting, cleaning and spraying her room. The bed linen was put through the washer twice before she would use it. The carpet was shampooed vigorously before she would walk on it (and even then, only with shoes on). The wardrobe was scrubbed before she would hang anything in it and the pillow was, of course, thrown out and replaced.
To make my own room more habitable, I had covered the peeling walls with Monet and Van Gogh prints. I bought rugs to cover the filthy carpet and lifted the musty air with lilies and carnations. On the window-sill sat a bonsai tree which I had lovingly nurtured for five years, pruning and clipping and shaping it with wire. It would teach me discipline, said my mother when she presented me with the seeds and the soil.
My best reminder of home, however, was the tiny candle on my bedside table. Each morning I took a match to it, releasing the sweet smell of peach into the air. In my mother’s kitchen, there is a fruit bowl filled with nothing but peaches. Peaches were my mother’s favourite fruit.
"They are lucky," she would say as she cut them into slices. "They give you long life."
A small, brown moth was batting about my elbow, dipping in and out of the candlelight. It’s strange how the silence of the night can amplify the most minuscule of sounds: his wings whirred like helicopter blades in my ear. I could even make out the rise and fall of Nina’s breathing in the next room.
I flipped on a few pages. My eyes, wanting to sleep, laboured with difficulty over each word. Reading had become a tiresome chore.
The birds began their dawn chorus. I could hear them quite clearly through my window, heralding the new day. They reminded me of the story my mother told me when I was younger. Something about sparrows and doves.
Concentrate, I thought to myself, gritting my teeth. I rubbed my tired eyes and tried to focus. I read slowly and purposefully, my lips moving around each word as if this would imprint them in my mind. But all I could see was a meaningless string of letters that danced before my eyes.
"Hopeless," I whispered aloud. "This is hopeless."
My words were swallowed into the inky darkness and were offered no reply.
"Is there anybody out there?" I asked in despair.
Then the telephone rang, making me jump out of my skin. The fact that it rang at that precise moment spooked me. The prospect of venturing downstairs into the darkness of the hallway spooked me even more. It was all thanks to a horror movie I had watched last night, against my better judgement.
Someone, however, intercepted the telephone on its fifth ring. I could hear the muffled voice downstairs, angrily berating the caller for phoning at such an unearthly hour. But then the anger quickly subsided, and there was an altogether different quality to the voice a milder tone. I couldn’t quite identify the owner, nor the nature of the call. It was impossible to make out any of the words -- they were brief and scant and interspersed with long periods of silence.
Nina was still breathing jaggedly in her sleep. Nothing ever woke her. She actually had three alarm clocks strategically placed around her room, all set to explode into life within five minutes of each other. She had decided to put one on her bedside table, one at the foot of the bed, and one on her study desk in the far corner of her room. The theory was that she would be forced to leave her bed and physically walk over to the clock to switch it off. The problem was that she would then physically walk back to her bed and go to sleep again. I was her fourth alarm clock, and probably the most effective one because she couldn’t throw me across the room (although there had been occasions when she tried).
The receiver was slammed back into its cradle with a residual half-ring. I sat up, my ears straining. A door downstairs squeaked shut and then there was silence. The house fell back into slumber.
I waited patiently for five minutes but nothing stirred, except for the occasional sigh of a floorboard or the rattle of wind against the windows.
Disappointed, I lay back into bed and reached for my book again.
Click here to go to Chapter 2