Life (a short story), by Ochango

Life In Dayton, California, there stood a gray house on Life Street. It was a small house hidden to the passerby by surrounding trees. Flowerless rose bushes lined the front yard’s garden, looking dead and gloomy, as if to tell people that the inside of the home looked just the same. Behind the gray walls of this house were two rooms, one of which belonged to a young man named Keiran. His room was small, with only a messy bed, small closet, and desk that was piled monstrously high with papers. Of the only two windows on the whole house, his room had one, but that window was constantly covered by a towel. The trees weren’t enough on their own to block out the sun; Keiran preferred no sunlight came in if he was in his bedroom, where most of his time was spent. More than anything else in the world, he loved to write. Though the desk was never clear of his thoughts, dreams, and desires, Keiran always managed to make room for more compositions about those topics on top of all the others. In fact, he had never thrown a single one of his compositions away. He had no friends (he had never attempted to make any) and barely a mother to intrude on his personal space, so Keiran didn’t care to hide his writing. Nobody else ever went to his room or stayed there except him. In school, Keiran took only one class, having already obtained his other high school credits. For sixty minutes a day, five days a week, he came to the small classroom in the downstairs area of Le Day Highschool. That single class Keiran took was creative writing. Most days he simply sat at his desk, scribbling away, paying no attention to the lesson, and never once looking up. There wasn’t much to look at anyway. The walls were gray like his house, and possessed no sort of decoration. To the right of him sat a bright-haired (dyed red) girl named Eleanor. The only time they ever spoke was on the first day of school. “Are your credits forcing you to take this class too?” she asked. “No, I like to write,” Keiran answered in an annoyed tone. Since he was so blunt with her, a sour look on her beautiful face told both of them that the conversation was over. Even if he was rude to her, Keiran already knew there was something more to this girl. He liked Eleanor, but why, he didn’t know. As time went on, Keiran kept completely to himself and forgot about Eleanor unless he wasn’t writing, which was not often. His mind had little room for another person, or loving thoughts. “No,” he thought to himself each time her warm appearance touched his cold thoughts, “I have to focus on writing, and other more important things.” On a windy Saturday afternoon, Keiran could be found lying on his back on the floor of his bedroom, staring at the ceiling, searching for the perfect words to complete the last sentence in his latest composition for school. No sooner had the perfect string of words entered his mind, did they flee as a knock came at the front door. Surprised, he shuffled clumsily out of his room to answer this unexpected visitor. When he opened the door, who should he see standing before him but Eleanor. Right away, she started talking to him enthusiastically. “Last week, I noticed which house you always walk home to, as well as how all of your papers in creative writing class come back with “A”’s on them . . . So here I am, about to ask you for help on my own paper, which as you know, is due at the end of this week. I bet you’ve already finished, haven’t you?” She said everything to him in a rushed breath, so before he could even comprehend what she’d said, he guided her through the front door, with a look of absolute shock on his face as he processed her plea. How could anyone possibly want his help? A request for anything from Keiran was so unfamiliar to him. “Do you ever speak?” she asked in a girlish tone as she took of her sweater coat. “From time to time,” he answered, laughing in a cocky tone. With hardly and contemplation, he knew to escort her to his lair, except this time, he wondered what she would think of him. Ever so slightly, he cared what she was going to think of him. Eleanor said politely, “If you could just read my paper and tell me what is missing, I can be on my way shortly. I can see you’re about done with yours, and I don’t want to interrupt.” “Oh no, you’re not in the way at all. I was just finishing, hoping the right words would come to me for the ending, but then the doorbell rang,” he answered, staring thoughtlessly into her amazing brown eyes. Quickly, he looked down. Next, he took the paper from her and began to read it. As he was reading description and thoughts of the main character, Keiran almost felt sorry for this person in Eleanor’s story. Somehow, he knew exactly how it felt to act the same way, shut things out, and live life as a never-changing person. Realizing how much he could relate to this character, Keiran felt sick with himself. The more he thought about this, the worse he felt, and the more he thought about it, which brought him to a point where he could hardly pay attention to the words he was reading. If Keiran really was this dark, lonely, and boring character, he would want to change. He asked himself, “Do I really want to be any different?” However, the thought of changing lasted only a minute before Keiran remembered he had no motivation to live life to the fullest, the way he wrote about it in his compositions. For the time being, he could not ponder this anymore. He stopped reading the same two sentences over and over, so he didn’t waste another moment of his own time. When Keiran finally finished, all he had to offer Eleanor was an honest opinion. “Your character is too locked up in a world that doesn’t exist. What I feel this story needs is a change in the main character. When you really think about it, the sole purpose of a character is to make a story create a feeling inside the reader. You want to infuse something genuine in all characters, so the reader is left with a feeling they’ll never forget,” he told her. Then he asked, beginning to feel more strange inside over the story, “What was it that inspired you to write this piece the way you did in the first place?” Slowly taking her paper from him, as well as his cold right hand in her own right hand, Eleanor answered him, “You, Keiran.” She let her eyes lock into a stare with his and said, “You were my inspiration for this story, because every day I see you come into a classroom to write, always seeming emotionless, and then you walk home alone to a dark house. And now that I have seen your bedroom, I know that you also come to a dark, lonely room where all you have is yourself to think to in seclusion. There isn’t even any natural light in here! Don’t you ever want to take a walk, or see another special face? The fact that you don’t seem to want anything except nothing gave me an idea . . . And now here I am presenting it to you, hoping that maybe my story did exactly what you told me it should.” Slowly letting go of her hand, he stood up. Automatically, he reached up over to his bedroom window, and pulled the towel from it’s hanging place in front of it. Though little sun light was beating down from the sky that afternoon, Keiran’s room lit up beautifully. In the same second, as the light touched his pale skin and normally dark face, a wave of emotion crashed over his heart, leaving an unfamiliar warm sensation in his body. He looked back into Eleanor’s eyes. “Do you want to go for a walk with me right now?” burst from his lips. “Yes, I’d love to go on a walk with you,” she said, blushing. Instinctively, the couple walked toward the front door and put their coats on, forgetting about how to make papers worth a good grade in creative writing class. Eleanor and Keiran walked soundlessly away from his dark room, and from that gray house. Keiran found himself smiling when he looked at Eleanor, seeing her radiant red hair shining beneath the sun’s rays. After another moment, he glanced down to see his hand, still clasped tightly around this wonderful girl’s right hand, and he smiled even wider to himself, as together, they walked down the street called Life.