Troubled minds can better communicate with horror. She leaned back to the sofa, felt the dampness of her sweat on her back, clung her fingers into the sofa fabric, twisting the leather, stared at the painting. “Have the courage; there is no session for help tomorrow.” She was sensing something in the painting in the whiteness.
The various shades of white and grey, a landscape of a snowy day. The ground was covered with deep snow, thick fog in the air, some movement. Grayish shapes were appearing, very vaguely, in the mist, and then before acquiring a clear shape out the mist they disappeared, and then there was the plain white again. The nostalgia, she turned her face to the window wished she could see the same scenery in reality out the window. She said with a soft voice, “Oh tomatoes, I fully forgot the shop might close any minute.” She jumped off the sofa on her feet, grabbed the car keys off the sofa, rushed toward the door. Strangely, all fear had been removed; either the woman in the mirror had captured her or they could share the room. She had a desire to smile like the woman with blue glows. She threw her last look at the mirror; the reflection of the mysterious shades of the painting appeared once again in the mirror. This time they brought to her mind some reminiscence of the past; she had been there.
3
The Book
She opened the door. The ball of the money and her panty stayed behind on the floor. The elevator door was open she entered. She looked at the floor buttons, waited, thought, “How can I manage this time to deal with the landlady’s scolding complaints; to calm her down of my two months overdue rents, the money I spent on the mirror. She was there when the men were carrying the huge mirror up to the stairs for me. I cleverly walked at the back of the moving mirror past her front desk. Last time she caught me, I had to listen to her nagging for more than half an hour. Her husband doesn’t seem to be a bad guy; though too much obedient to her. I have never seen he looks at women straight into eyes, bashful and afraid of his wife’s wrath. Apparently, she is the real owner of the building, the business, and the husband. Fortunately, the couples are asleep at this time of the night; I hope.” She pushed the first-floor button, the elevator door closed.
The old landlady and her silent husband were working behind the counter at the side of the corridor, exceptionally late this night. She was declaring the apartment number of the tenants with overdue rents and the husband bent over the countertop, submissively, as always, was writing them down on the day’s collection sheet paper. She used to stand at the elevator side of the counter and her husband in her shadow; by the time the elevator doors would slide back, she was there to corner the renters with arrears before they have time to escape. They would either pay with many apologies to lower down her naggings as less as possible or run away to save the eardrums from the nastiest insults, all the way through the long corridor while followed by her with her mouth stuck behind their ears.
The elevator cabin was hot, sometimes the heater did not work, and sometimes overworked, the air conditioner was always broke. She had been sweaty before entering into the cabin, furthermore going down five stories in heat; the perspiration had completely saturated the thin dress. It molded her body like a transparent wrapping. She tried to pull the dress out to reshape the dress otherwise than her cleavage, the displaced fabric reversed as a magnet to its sinful position. The confined air was filled with a strange body odor.
The elevator doors slid back open to the corridor. The old husband was cleaning his eyeglasses to take a few moments out. Somebody at the same time went out the entrance door, leaving the doors open. The cold air outside plunged headlong into the corridor, rubbed all the precious perfume out the cabin, vacuumed it out the cabin into the corridor. The loaded air in its way out, in a hurry to steal all the loot, gave a share to the old man’s nose. The man dropped his eyeglasses on the countertop, his mouth opened, his nostrils widened to inhale a good of this rubbery. The stream of strange aroma burnt his nostrils for some milliseconds; his mind paused then a powerful wave of electricity flowed through the nasal paths all the way with the speed of light to all his six million sensory cells. The incomplete evolved sense of human smell was unable to assess it in any of the primitive rankings between pleasant to unpleasant, therefore, succumbed under the influence, and paralyzed.
Floating in the passing current, anchored to the countertop in greed for the source. His upper body past the visual blockage of his fat wife; laid his chest on the countertop, secured his belly to the inside edge of the reception desk in an attempt to get more share of running air. His head overhanging out the edge of the countertop, he faced to the woman shyly stepping out the cabin. His eyes got a blurred vision of a white feather angel parading across him; as she passed the intruding head, the man’s head and the two full-circled pipes in the nose were detecting her movement like a turning around radars. The unclean eyeglasses were smashed under his chest.
She as passing the counter remembered the ball of the money had been missed on her apartment floor at the door. She decided to turn back but the elevator doors closed and she heard the screeching noise of the cabin moving up for another passenger. “I cannot go back and stand at the elevator with my sweaty back stuck to the dress in front of the man’s widened eyes, besides the landlady’s head is bent over a paper and I am fortunate that she is not raising it to see me. This is an exceptional opportunity to flee her nasty complaints.” She sweated more when remembered the money was not the only thing she had forgotten to pick up, her panty.
She walked toward the building door, her head up was looking straight. There was no sound except the provocative sound of slippers flip-flops on the laminated floor. The movement randomly was waving the flower pattern over the bulge at the junction of her thighs on and off; fanning the mystifying scent from the source. The all-of-the-time nagging landlady was staying dead silent during the procession. The overdue resident passed her, no complaint of her. She was pretending to read the sheet paper, staring all the time from the corner of her eye to the old man who was swimming over the countertop. The woman was not very ashamed of her situation under the synchronized twist of the man head, rather happy that her body solved, for now, her problem with the landlady. She rewarded the poor man a generous amount of her heavy aroma as passing the poor man. He deserved some short time vacation in paradise before going back to the life sentence with a punishment term of the everyday ration of the vinegar smell of his wife. The man’s eyes escorted her until she passed the building glass door and disappeared in the dark night.
“I am so ashamed of you,” the landlady shouted at the man, burning fire had scorched her face. The man slowly straightened up. Looked calmly at the broken eyeglasses, one of the lenses smashed the other taken out. The man’s indifference raised landlady’s anger to fury; she added insult to her accent, “I guess you cannot recall your posture old man, a few inches further if you went, you would be now outside the building with your head between her wet thighs.”
“I was reading.”
“Reading?” the landlady’s mood changed a bit, as she didn’t expect such an excuse for his rudeness.
“I was reading a book together with my deceased father. A fairy tale for a four-year-old son. I was leaning to his chest, sitting on his laps, listening to his articulate storyline and repeating while looking at the text as if I could read the book together with him. I had heard the story once and never after because at the same night my father died of heart attack while I was asleep on his chest. The same night the book was lost. For more than sixty years, I lived with the guilt that I was responsible for his