These old windows, operated by worn cranks, filter the world through a permanent haze. Worn paint peels off by the inch revealing layer upon layer of stained pasts. The floor creaks where I stand though I don’t so much as sway. Perhaps it’s the teenage angst they claim should be boiling within my viens. The walls give nothing away, not a blink nor a smirk and I wonder again and again if they could just absorb me, make me disappear without a trace, what history would this old room show?

Greta had the room before me, so they say. Before that a man with barely a face and no name. Before them? Those people are long gone. Victims of loose window cranks.

The world through that window haze looks so serene, a universe unlike my own. It must be so divine, to float away in that daze.

My mind begins to drift, the very thing that spurred my interment here. I’m drifting away, from this room, from the world at large. There are creatures beyond the window, in the blurry starlight of the world at night. Some are big, they fly far above me to places yet unknown. Some are small, confined to the land below. They nip the seams of my tattered jeans, wishing to bring me low. It’s their cries, shrill and unending, that pierce the silence.

Detached from myself, I pull the crank and feel my soul drop thousands of feet in seconds; right back to the creaking floor of this room. The years have rusted this portal shut.

Somewhere, in the back of my rational mind, I hear the nurses say “take the medicine dear, it’ll keep the monsters at bay.”

Crank