That Old Chair

She sat on the old chair that lay on the patio, a regal wooden chair, past its prime, lying in the open unforgiving weather. The chair had been there for ages. She imagined its brother and sister chairs standing comfortably in the living room looking at it haughtily as if it were a leper with a broken arm. She sat on it and looked out over the lake. A gentle rain was falling muddying and dirtying the river, so different from its usual transparent state. The river reflected her state of mind, clouded and dimpled with a thousand unconnected thoughts. She looked at the leafless trees standing naked and bored with the constant rain, lifeless and still, very much like her own life. She sat there trying to stay unmoving, to make an effort to listen to the sounds around her, the ticking of a clock behind her, the humming of the neighbor’s heater, the trickling of rain water down the drain pipe. She marveled at how little of nature’s pure sounds she could hear over the constant incomprehensible babel inside her own head! She was never the type to stay still, she envied people who said they could gaze at the ocean for hours, she never quite understood what was so captivating or fascinating about it. On this day she wished she did.

She thought of that morning, of the reddest vegetable she chopped for a salad - the beetroot, tough to chop yet so delicate as to stain anything upon touch. She hated the beetroot ever since she was a child. “Eat it and you will have the rosiest cheeks” her mother would lie to her. Today she was intrigued by the novelty of something so familiar, the curves inside it so similar to the veins on her arm, its crimson juice staining her fingers as she sliced through it, revolted by how another object could taint her.

And now as she sat on the chair, she thought, how ironic the chair with the broken arm must feel, with warm crimson liquid seeped gently over it, tainting it, and the life gently seeping out of her….

  --DiVyA --