This is something I'm drawing from Behind the Closet Doors, these bunch of poems I wrote. I seem to like to toy with idea of Archie and darkness, darkness being both literal and figurative. His little hideout dreams, the only hopes he had for himself, are soundly crushed, which is, I suppose, a double meaning. So here it is, another installation to this little series of mine.
Dark
His surroundings were plainly dark, not an ounce of light that crept through the cracks of the closet. He smiled to himself secretly, broken pencil cocked.
Archie was hiding in the closet again, writing his poems.
To anyone else, he knew it would sound pathetic. But it was a great escape for him - from the outside world, from everything that tormented him. The other orphans sneered when they saw him writing. They would even snatch the paper from his hands, and if they were in a bad mood, they would tear it up. And there would go a brilliant spark of inspiration - gone, flickering and dashed to the ground and put out.
No, this was a much better idea.
He smiled and switched on his flashlight. Bright light immediately graced the scrap paper. He began scrawling his first few lines, cancelling when he made corrections because he didn't even have his own eraser.
In the dark, he was free to do what he wanted. No one could stop him. And to him, light was only too bright and too harsh - reality was harsh. Needless to say, he loved the darkness, and he loved to let it consume him and swallow him up into it, where he would only have himself to face. Nothing else hindered him, not even his Archilles' heel. The darkness was special.
A few hours later and he had completed about ten poems. It was near dinner time, and he decided he'd get out. He didn't want to face the strict caretaker, or worse - let anyone find out his little secret.
Pushing at the door with one hand, he gathered his things with his other. The door was to swing open, creaking on its hinges, as usual, but there was something wrong this time. To his horror, he realised that it was soundly stuck.
He pulled harder this time, desperately. The doors heaved and buckled but would not give. Fear and terror hit him as he realised no one even knew he was in the closet. Not anyone, not the caretaker, not even the bullies down the hall! Suddenly, the musty, dingy smell that cloaked the closet was no longer inviting. In fact, it spelled terror.
This closet, he only then realised, was in the storage room. The point was, it wasn't used on normal days. This started looking more and more like a nightmare. The clutches of fear had him in his grip, and two not-too-encouraging seconds later, his stomach rumbled. Dinner was served now, and he was going to miss it. But that was the least of his problems.
Somewhere along the way, he must have dozed off. When he finally opened his eyes, the enormity of his predicament came two times harder down on him than yesterday. It must have been Lady Luck beaming down on him because the door suddenly swung open. He fell out - he had been leaning on the door, after all - and right into the light.
"There you are," the woman said sternly. It was the caretaker, and she didn't look too happy.
For now, he was too relieved to care. That is, until he saw Tim. Tim, the bully down the hall who always stole his lunch money. He wore a self-satisfied smirk, one that immediately raised his suspicions. And all too soon he knew why he had been trapped. It had been no accident...
And from that day onwards, he never crept into the closet again.
