How did the stench go?
She didn’t know why she had that question. The last time she came home the living room had smelled of a dead rat. They couldn’t find the source and so they had left it at that. But this time it wasn’t there.
Was it that her parents had somehow succeeded in tracing it or was it because of her- her getting used to it or her nose being blocked ?
Her nose wasn’t blocked, it was just that she sneezed a lot and her eyes itched, her ears too. It had started the moment she got here, at her home- at least half because of the weather and the rest because of her intense dislike for the place.
She had no fond memories attached to her hometown and its people, only bad ones. She didn’t even remember them anymore or try to remember, but she felt the discomfort.
She wasn’t accepted for who she was. They wanted her to change. Not much, just those tiny details. But those tiny details were very precious to her. So precious, that she would have turned those people and their ways around just to feel safer being herself.
She couldn’t do that though. So she tried to change what was immediately around her. She redid the house- the curtains, the furniture, the way the table was laid and the plastic flowers were arranged in the vase. She did it for a while- months. She quit. Too much to do and too little change. She couldn’t care anymore. The house was also one of them, a stranger.
Her thoughts spun around again. Where was mother? It was almost lunchtime and….. how did the stench go?