A living creature fills an empty refuge.

Imagine waking up in an environment, your eyes still unopened, faintly, you hear get wind of a storm, a blizzard that has been raging for days. The
outside is plain cold, luckily you are inside a house. AS you regain consciousness you come outside your bed shell, you check your standing balance.
It is noticeable that your senses are sharp and your head is full of air. You open the door from your bedroom and enter the dining space. You spend
most of your time here, drinking coffee and eating toasts. A living creature fills an empty refuge. There is no past, at least no recent past. There is only
reverberation. 

If you could, you would try to remember where you were before coming here. But the thought never quite forms in your mind. Can you see
someone? Anyone? A veil of frozen water hangs outside the window. Threads of sun keep flashing on the outside. The whole containing atmosphere
feels more than tridimensional. You light up a cigarette and then figure it is way too early. You put it out with a hiss. The water turns brown.

Written sheets of paper lay mostly everywhere. Someone was chasing a big idea. Where were you when this was happening? Maybe you were
sleeping while somebody else was working. You figure how did you not notice, someone working his brains out while you were pulling levers in your
sleep. The scribbles show many formulaic expressions, but there are so many pages to make sense of. A smell of burnt coffee is noticeable now. You
put honey to avoid tasting anything else other than sweetness and take a sip. It is cold. And sour.

It’s better to check the fuse box since the lights are not working. Actually, you don’t know if there’s any circuit breakers here. Actually, where are
you? Why haven’t you asked that yourself already? Do you know? What do you know that we don’t yet? You go back to the coffee even though it
was established ‘twas not good. It does taste familiar now that you think about it. Can there be awareness in this lucid-dream-like world? It can. You
know. You know more than what the writer knows. He/she, the narrator, is just trying to understand you. It’s a matter of perception. The muffled light.
Your quiet persona. The room’s single air. What do you feel? 

It feels like your clothes have got thrice as worn than usual. You know what you are smelling now, on your clothes. What does sulfur smell like?
Does sulfur smell like anything? Not everyone has the ability to smell elemental sulfur. [Sulfur] It’s not very strong but quite distinctive, and very
persistent. What most people mean when they say they smell sulfur is sulfur dioxide (sharp, choking), or hydrogen sulfide (rotten eggs). Sulfur plays a
part in very many of the more obnoxious smells, some of which our noses can detect at parts per billion - like mercaptan, the odor added to gas to
warn of gas leaks. It's the trace of sulfur in organisms that's mainly responsible for the evil smelling decay of death that we've evolved to sense and
avoid. It is said to smell literally like the color black. But do you feel, as everybody’s guess would be, sinister and revving? No. Thank you. You feel
volcanic.
But back to the house: There are three rooms, one of them is closed. A living room, which can be rearly exited to the outside, is presented as an
appendix of the dining area.There is a kitchen and a bathroom. There is a laundry room, which is silent. An anteroom out the front door, and another
before that. Every room is silent. Maybe, you think, the only living thing in this house is your mind. There is a sense of something being very old. Here
is the imagination working, picturing a cellar and then a door leading to a filled-in-cave, in the floor of which stone tools are scattered and remnants
of glacial fauna apprehended in the layers below that. Further down who knows? Hopefully the answer is not there.
It could be deducted by now that the things we have or may have forgotten are “housed”. You can and do imagine neon acrylics and you would like
to squeeze them onto your hands and gently touch the living room’s most illuminated wall, the east one, a couple dozen times. You would call it all
my empire. And of course it would take its way. What exactly would be ours?
Perhaps there is paint somewhere. The room in which you woke up just an hour ago now seems emptier. Not that things have vanished but the
things themselves seem more bare. For all one knows going back to bed wouldn’t be the end of the world. But no, going into bed in this situation
would equal to becoming an expressionless fossil á la Sphinx of Giza. No way. Answers must be met. Onto and into the other room. Nothing. Just
smellier sulfur-smell. A black dress hanging from the curtain rod. Christmas lights. Empty cans and coins by the window. Curled towels. A calendar.
Fish leather. A broken orange salt lamp on the floor. A dirty mirror. Shiny makeup. Silica gel bags. A thermos. A knife. Bread crumbs. Surprisingly,
olive oil. “RiceDream” small cartons, torn plastic wrapper, 20x20cm cardboard, three or four greasy glasses, and a bed with blue sheets and green
duvet. But no paint. Try to open, locked, so knock, on the other room. A few seconds pass. You try to look through the keyhole, you see a window
and lots of what appear to be, lots, of Christmas lights. Like a spider threading cables. Turn the knob and tackle. To no success. What is it about this
room? Is there something about it other than it’s locked? Alas, maybe it’s better for everyone, and I mean, everyone, to ignore this room. Why?
Because we don’t know what’s behind it. It is not unconceivable that there is someone in there. Like, right now. Someone unknown to you. No, you
just need paint. No need for someones. But if you can’t find any? Then what else?

There is canned tomato sauce in the kitchen cupboard. And there is what appears to be something like mayonnaise. And another blue-colored
sauce. Possibly made of berries. Very aesthetic. At least that you figure. The products are in a foreign language. But when you face the wall, you
can’t go through with it. It is not fully known why. You just stare. You light another cigarette. Times passes.

You stay standing, motionless, looking at the outside for a considerable amount of time. At last, you are turning the exit-door knob. A bigger relative
size, outside. You take a step, carefully. The snow is crunchy. You take another step. You leave without the help of ideas, and, as it is, quite naturally.
The day is diaphanous, lightweight, prairied. It is more or less 10 A.M.