One AMONG MANY

Flash Fiction

The Friday dusk was sultry, I lay some twenty-two years younger than what my actual age was supposed to be.

The warm trade wind made its way through an open French window to the south of my study. But that didn’t intend to wake me to reality.

The wind wasn’t powerful, though a sudden thud did its work. Woke me to the beginning.

On the window pane, furry Pepe Le Pew gave a huge leap. He sat on its narrow platform and admiringly gazed at his princedom to as far as his mellow happy and his dark brown pupil could gauge. No, not that flirty, filthy skunk from the Cartoon Network series.

My Pepe might adore himself to be a nocturnal by choice and breed as a skunk, but on the contrary, stood spoilt for choice, and, settled for nothing less than a piece of a few deep orange-coloured aromatic diced raw pumpkin with an honest “Purrrrrrrrrrrr!  Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr! Meow!”  

With him aside, I steadily sat holding the books close, even closer, and rather closest than I had ever held them back then. My eyes and index finger clinched every page recced through and deposited them in my existing grey matter. The verbatim account, now, must fetch the desired results, I thought. The full syllabus lay in front to down pat before the final semester.

It wasn’t also the time for Pepe’s munchkin to appear yet with those delicious yellow appetizers. This ginger Turkish Angora just gazed and dozed. Dozed and gazed. Finally tucking his bushy tail underneath his hind legs, reaching until his whiskers that he boastfully licked quite off and on, he then kipped.

“What is it that you keep looking at making yourself tired for another snooze my Le Pew?” There wasn’t any meow this time. I lay partially awake on my couch, just a few feet from him.

Dabbing the light sweat running down the temple and neck with the towel that draped my cosy pillow case, I noticed it accompanying several other pillows in the other two bedrooms before it made its way to the sofa wherein I dozed. It smelt familiar, distinctly the Aesop brand. It faded. I ignored. But, I still knew it was what it was meant to be. The smell had to persist.

A huge wall shelf to the right of where I lazed to catnap every afternoon was home to my passion, keeping myself stimulated even in my deepest slumber. Books. Books, from floor to ceiling and then from right to left, then left to right. Vertically, horizontally, and diagonally, they lay everywhere in every shape forming imaginary visible geometric patterns in the study. They were fat, they were thin, and then they were perfect octavo or a quarto, elephant folio, atlas folio and several coming from various genres apart from those regular college study guides.

The unkempt hair, slithery lips, almost droopy kohled eyes, my lethargic body and the most of it demanded some more rest. Cerebrally, something in me failed to relax.

Last semester, the marks were below the desired grades. I’d better gear up for the next. The next was on the very next morning.

Paranoid, that I might run late reaching the college, I rushed in the wee hours to secure my presence in the exam hall the next morning.

The morning sun was hushed up behind the cloudy sky with a humid tone. I spotted two, three, four, five familiar faces. One of them stood at a distant, charmingly bright. My crush. But all hasted to the institute’s entry stairway without taking a heed of me. The stairwell led to a well-defined architectonic open lobby with seven carved Grecian pillars guarding the entry block. From the lobby, another staircase ended on the first floor, and as the steps ended, a right turn led to the exam hall.

“Are you well prepared boys and girls?” a conversant, sullen voice echoed along.

“The Mole concept, sir, stoichiometry, even the periodic tables, I couldn’t memorize neither of them.” What more to confess? I struggled hard to secure the grades. The voice turned a deaf ear without a reply, and left.

“I didn’t prepare well even this time,” I rammed on my crush as I continued mumbling. He smiled. He winked. He wished luck. I felt a bunch of thousand romances running through my veins. He ignored. I tried nullify the thoughts, but in vain.

While all penned their knowledge, I just gazed and gauged. My ink-filled pen was jammed between my fingers. Memory froze. I can only collapse to wait for a catastrophic future. Without a degree.

And the crush? I aborted the adoration in the womb before forming an embryonic status.

The hall kept writing, but my stressed inkless brain wasn’t fluent, unlike others’ pen. I kept blinking before a forty wink. The short bell rang. My heart skipped a beat.

All the concepts, theories and mathematics I failed to learn by heart, awaits another try within those old foxed pages. The next might be a fruitful one. ….. And I continued dreaming.

Pepe Le Pew insisted licking her dream off with his nagging moist tongue. The doorbell kept ringing, until she hurried out of her sofa, rubbed the sleep from her eyes, made her hair, and paced through the hallway to open the door to the reality.

“Ah! It was all but a dream.” The thirty-eight year old I murmured to a grin. Pepe’s manipulation followed for some tasty treats.

Content is Subject to Copyright

_{Copyrights Reserved Swati Basu Das}