STRANGE
693 Words
I would spend the next few hours unconscious.
In all that time, I lay without knowing a single thing, and it took quite a while for my brain to adjust when I opened my eyes and sat up sometime later. Then I remembered that I was running for my life, and started to move again, ignoring all the aches that would have made me glad to stop.
My escape went on for as long as an hour, until I came upon an old-fashioned hut. The very looks of this odd place told me off, and had starvation not been growling at my insides, I would have found another shelter.
“Hello. Is anybody home?” I called for the first time, waiting for a response. When none came, I called again, and the door handle rattled. Even it — this door handle — was old-fashioned, and I wondered if the people who lived here were those people who decided that they wanted to keep dead, forgotten things alive and proclaim themselves keepers of history.
I took a step back, ready to run if anything unfriendly was behind that door, until an old man who appeared to be in his sixties showed up when it creaked wide open, and his small eyes searched for who it was that called. I was quick to take in his features — the gray tufts of hair that sat on either temple of his head, the baldness in-between them, and the thick mustache that sat right above his lips. His face did not look friendly, but the blank look it gave and the hunger that nabbed at me nudged me to speak to him.
The man looked at me with a puzzled expression before disappearing back behind his door, the slamming sound it made the extinguishing of a flame of hope I had gotten from him.
I stood, and madly pained by this, spat out the worst curse words I could think of as hunger can inspire people to bravery and guts they never had before, and I was barely done when the man came out again, sending me into a sprint over a few metres, and another look at the man. He was yelling, and my eyes stung until they blurred, forcing me to wipe the tears that filled them. This one action, for many years to come, will be the one that saved my life. Because I looked at that man's hand, and saw him waving a piece of bread.
Not knowing whether to go or not, because I knew he had heard the curses, I chose to do the former, walked back up to where he stood before his odd house, and made him an apology that was born of regret and came very sincerely from the bottom of my heart before taking the bread.
I took it from him while he smiled at me, and then stared at the bread in confusion. It was nothing like the bread I knew and was used to, the one that Miranda liked. It was rather strange, but I ate it anyway, figuring that something had to go down my stomach.
It was not the tastiest bread to my tongue as I chewed it, and it had a different texture, but I gulped it down anyway. The man watched me with curious eyes before disappearing into his house suddenly, making me wonder if I had to wait. I chose to, and he appeared again with a strange cup made of wood. I took it from him gratefully, meditated on the strangeness of this cup, and again succumbed to my hunger as a deciding factor.
He spoke to me when I handed the cup to him, and I found that he spoke a language similar to mine, our communication only marred by a slight variation in words. Somehow, we worked our way through it, and I told him that I needed a place to sleep and stay in.
I would eat all my curses when he led me into the strangest house I had ever been in.
It was strange, but at least
I had a place to sleep.
- Writer
