Linda G Hill’s Stream of Consciousness Saturday Prompt: First Thing

First thing I saw when I opened the door was the small dark room lit by one window covered with spiderwebs and dust.

The pale yellow light struggling through the window did nothing to drive the shadows away from the aged  books on the shelves that lined the walls.

The  floor was littered with more books but like the books on the shelves,  some of the covers were faded, others looked brand new. Some of the volumes spines had been broken with care,  and others with unbridled enthusiasm.

Who read these books, I wondered, who put them on the shelves? Who left them on the floors and piled in the corners?

I reached down and I picked one up, I opened it and turned the pages slowly one by one.

The pages were blank.

I walked into the room and set it on a table.

I went to the shelves and I took down one book after another and turned the pages and found that they were blank too.

I was about to drop the last book I had pulled down on the floor and instead I put it back where I had found it.

This small dark room I had wandered into  was full of books covered with dust, discarded, abandoned, forgotten and left to rot where they fell or where they were left.

There was an old chair next to the table, I pulled it back and carefully sat down. It creaked a little but it held.

I pulled one of the books towards me, I opened it’s cover and I turned one page and then another. It didn’t smell musty, it didn’t look moldy, so

I reached for a pen- one of a dozen or so  scattered around the table and I thought about what to write and then it came to me:

It was just me, all alone in a dark room full of dust and spider webs and books waiting to be written.

So I wrote,

The last thing I heard, before I started to write was the sounds of creaking boards and a gentle breeze making it’s way through a small dusty window filled with sunlightt