Mini Story #3 - (untitled excerpt)

The blinds were still up, although by now it was evidently dark outside, and I had already switched on the light. I think I was blowing my nose – or sneezing, because I remember when my mother first walked in she said, “Don’t tell me you caught a cold again.” I’m not certain of the dialogue afterwards – I vaguely recall some comments about the deplorable state my room was in (I defended myself indignantly, although of course she was right) and then there were probably some other statements before we heard the knocking on the front door. Three knocks – deliberate, and rather loud, as I first thought, because we could hear them clearly from where we were down the hall. I groaned as my mother told me to answer it, before she walked away to do it her self, grabbing a shawl from somewhere within the clutter of my room She made some sort of curt remark to herself on my laziness as she left, the pitch of her voice lowering as she went down the hall, the sound stopping abruptly when she was close enough to the front door for someone outside to hear. So I waited and leaned my chair back towards the door of my room, figuring that she was looking through the peephole, and soon enough I heard the clunky sound of the latch being opened, and the faint traces of the creaking door. Do you ever wonder why you can remember some things so clearly, and yet have certain things completely blotted away in your mind, so much so that you are consciously aware of their existence, yet can do nothing to retrieve the memory? Because I remember hearing the murmurs of conversation from my room, and remember recognizing a few words, but now I have no idea what those words were. Even stranger is the fact that I could hear those words in the first place – after all, I was only leaning my head towards the door of my room, and anything I picked up would have been nothing but a collection of muffled sounds. Maybe I just thought I heard something. In any case, the string of sounds and silence continued for a long while, so with mild curiosity I eventually I got up and walked towards the source.