Purgatory

There was complete silence. Only broken intermittently by the casual, soothing strokes of a pen against a paper. Every swooping, cursive movement, unique in the sound it produced. The source of that disturbance being a lone man in a corner. The room was entirely wooden, its floor laden with planks and its roof adorned in rustic woods. The wooden walls spoke of ages. An old cottage of refuge. A lone shack of solace. The room was small in dimensions but possessed a window, through which golden rays of the midday’s sun slanted across the floor, lighting the indoors. The man was busy scribbling on a parchment, which had a yellow hue of its own. He sat on a small wooden chair, so obsolete that it appeared it only had a few more years before it would refuse to endure any more burden, and would crumble to its death not being able to shoulder its own weight. The table upon which the writing was in progress suffered the same fate. There was no other furniture in the vicinity. Nevertheless, the room was cluttered with various items, deteriorating to age. Their true shapes and colours completely cloaked under thick layers of dust; owing to which everything appeared in the shades of yellows and browns. These piles of objects were covered in cobwebs, and so it seemed that it must have been decades since someone regarded them worthy of any use. The sole inhabitant of that shack definitely had not disturbed them lately. The humming sound in the room came to a halt, and the strokes of the pen ceased in motion. The man was apparently done with his task. He placed the parchment on top of a stack of similar papers onto the desk. He stood up and walked out of the door. The scene outside merits its own separate account. The man now stood at the threshold of his house, which was the only blemish in the otherwise deserted locality. The land was barren, a vast stretch of hardened sand and dirt. Tall rugged, rocky mountains erected across all sides. There was no sign of any other life as far as eye could behold. Not even a dead, rotting shrub could come into a sight. The sun was shining straight up in the sky. No clouds, just a blue stretch of sky. The place was a complete forlorn desert by any definition one could offer, neglected by gods themselves; despised and abandoned by life of all kinds, differing only in that there still breathed a soul right in its middle.