Through The Window Of Reality

Through the Window of Reality

Cynthia Raines was lost in the world of her imagination. In the humidly hot summer night, her nose was slick with sweat and the natural oils of her skin, causing her heavy eyeglasses to slip lower and lower until, frustrated, she pushed them back up her nose. Her hand went back to the keyboard of her dilapidated laptop as she continued writing of dragons, damsels and angelic knights. A dark awry curl tumbled out of her messy bun and onto her sticky forehead; she let out a grunt of discontent and again lifted her hand that had been hitting the keys feverishly, to tame the offending lock. She gave her glasses a push for extra measure, before resuming her epic tale.

Twenty minutes later, Cynthia, or has her friends called her, Cyn, glanced at the bottom of the screen to see it was close to two in the night. She had class in six hours. Plenty of time, she thought, to finish this chapter, and get a couple of hour’s worth of sleep she needed to function.

She got up and went to the tiny crammed bathroom in her painfully small studio apartment. Splashing cool water on her hot face, she grabbed a headband that was lying on the side of the sink, and placed it far back on her head to keep the irritating tendrils out of her face for good. Then she took two bobby pins and placed one on each side of her head clamping the legs of the glasses to her hair and fixing the glasses to her nose, as she had done so many times before. She made sure to place a shoe in front of the bathroom door, to stop it from moving with the slight breeze coming from the sluggish ceiling fan to make an annoying squeaking sound. Making a mental note to ask the landlord to fix the door’s hinges and its lock, she went to the fridge, filled a glass with cold water, and finally made her way back to her unsteady desk.

An hour later, with no distractions, she was close to finishing the chapter and was completely unaware of her surroundings, lost in words as she was. At first, she didn’t even hear the disturbance going on beneath her window that had been barred for safety as it opened into an alley that gave her the chills and was the hang-out spot of many young delinquents. She was roused out of her literary stupor with the loud screeching of tires. Her ears perked up as she listened carefully for other odd noises in the otherwise silent night in the criminal-infested area she lived in. She was just about to go back to the good Princess Maya’s other-worldly adventures when she heard the distinctive sound of a bottle breaking precariously close to her apartment’s window.

Cynthia was scared. She stumbled out of her chair and slammed her hand on the light switch, leaving the room lit with only moonlight. She didn’t want whoever was out there to know she was up. She didn’t think it would have any effect if someone was coming to rob her, but she still felt safer now that her window wasn’t the only one still lit up at this time.

She inched closer and closer to the window and peaked outside. Squinting in the dark, she saw a body sprawled on the concrete ground. Great, she thought, another inebriated idiot thrown out by a cabbie, no doubt, when he didn’t have any money to pay the driver. In her analytical mind, she thought that this was the best guess. It would explain the tire screech, the thrown bottle and the unintelligible mumbles that were now coming from the person. She quickly slipped her hand behind the bars and snapped the window shut. She had opened it just a few inches so she could breath in her stuffy room, but she figured now that bearing the heat will be better than the chance any other flying debris landing in her room.

She was just about to turn back and head to her illuminated laptop screen when she heard a strangled scream before the person got on all fours and tried to stand up on wobbly legs. Cynthia was surprised to see that it was a woman and a feeling of dread crept up her throat as she noticed the blood-spattered and bruised stranger look up at her through the bars.