A really short story 2

Continues from the earlier post

In fact, it was hardly alive at all.

Hardly.

When the man entered the room he was aware of a stillness beyond his understanding. Not comprehending it, he consigned it to the dustbin of his thoughts where so many over-subtle structures, words and patterns had been consigned. This was the tragedy of the room.

The tragedy becomes irony when one considers that the man was a poet, known to his friends, when suitably prompted, as "a sensitive soul". Even this man, this poet, this sentient creation, was unable to sense the constant miscarriage of consciousness struggling to be born in front of his eyes.

For the room wanted desperately to be. It wanted the validation of its patterns, its interactions, its symbiotic desperation. It wanted to be acknowledged. If it had understood the idea, it would have wanted David Attenborough to come and whisper poignantly as he filmed it. It wanted to breathe, to consume, to copulate and shudder a little afterwards. It wished it could take decisions, speak, run, slide, drive, shoot, drink, vomit, borrow and all the things that happened within 20 or so feet of it.

At least, this is what it would have wanted, if only it could think.

All it could do was decay. And even that was due to the naturally entropic nature of the universe, not the result of the room's functions or decisions. All it could do was die, very slowly. Almost imperceptibly so, in fact, to the poet who was one of those people who looks on the bright side of everything. He could not see the fading desperation, the slow death and the stillborn existence of the room.

If only he could see it, or taste it - anything would do! Think of the realms of ideas that would flow through him and his expressive shorthand if this exisquisite nothing had occurred to him...

But nothing remained nothing. No words were written, no haikus penned nor quatrains massacred in honour of the room. No lullabies were sung, no paeans echoed and no riffs painstakingly assembled by spotty, overenthusiastic youths, about the room. No operas were composed, no requiems intoned and no harmonies warbled about the room.

Nothing was said about the room.

Once, the poet had almost said something about it in some off-hand remark to a colleague about "his place". But it was unspecific. And almost rude, certainly dismissive. The room would have been upset to hear it, had it feelings. Or ears, come to think of it. The colleague, however, was not even listening. That was as close as it had come to incarnation, to birth, to actuality.

How sad.

How very sad.