The Murales – Flash Fiction – March 17, 2015

Dear Diary,

Today was a hot sunny day.  I arrived yesterday from Italy and was just too tired to do any exploring!  Ah, but today bright and early I decided to take a walk down main street and shoot a few photographs.  I came upon a rather strange building.  There were some lovely shops at street level but the building itself was very old and weather beaten. It looked to me like an old brick waterfront warehouse.

I wanted to get a closer look at it so I moved back a bit then realized that the building front, which seemed to be covered in windows, was in fact covered with a decaying ‘murales’ of flaking windows! I began to click away, you just know how I love an interesting subject,  when suddenly the top floor windows began to fill up with people! They jostled one another as they pointed at me.  I looked around to see if anyone else had noticed, but everyone went about their business obliviously.  I’d often noticed that few people ever look higher than a shop window alas, today proved no different. I went back to clicking away feeling that this would be a great piece for my weekly Sunday column at the ‘Times’.

I wasn’t paying much attention to the world around me, so it was no surprise that I stepped off the curb into the street nearly getting myself hit by a car.  A policeman came up to me and admonished me, saying I should be more careful.  I apologized and then decided to ask him what he thought of the people in the second story windows above the chain of stores.

“What people in what windows miss?” he asked me curiously.

I pointed upwards and to my surprise and embarrassment I discovered there were in fact no windows, painted or otherwise.

“I think you might want to have yourself a nice cuppa, perhaps the sun’s been playing tricks on you miss.” he said rather unsympathetically.

I walked dazed down the street occasionally looking back, the windows insisted on not returning.  Once I got back to my room, I took my SD card  out of my camera and slipped it into the card reader of my net-book … the photo above is just one of around 50 which I took this morning.  So what happened?

 

This post is dedicated to Justine with many thanks for lending me the use of the above photograph! and is linked to Phylor’s Mindlovemisery’s Tale Weavers post