The Phantom Room

After a long and epiphanic taxi ride, I finally reached my destination.

I stood in the foyer, studying paper-thin strips of blue gleaming under the shut doors. Unbearable despair and loneliness filled me up. Which one was it? Have I come to the right place?

I opened a door at random. The room was dim and tidy and filled with an enormity of a sea. There was smoke everywhere, through the smoke I saw him sitting on a low bed covered with husk. Just behind the bed ran a nice little river. Was it a river? Or a stream? Whatever It was, many fish lived in it. The fish didn’t care about my loneliness or despair or why was I there. The fish ate the weeds that grew in the stream or the river.

Water was streaming down the walls and gathering in a pool on the floor.

Hernando and Rachael were in their nightdresses. It seemed they had just made love.  

I exhaled them like the human-shaped river of smoke that had leaked into the room.

--

I woke up at three a.m. The moonlight lit up the room and its objects: bed, books, blood-soaked sheets, lamp, and a baby as if I'd turned on a lamp.

P.S. This is an excerpt from a scene where a man is trying to re-piece an event after being under the heavy effects of opium.