knock

image source: deviantart

Three neat knocks in a row. Another four together.

Again a few knocks.

The sound seeps through the wood.
Different knocks have different accents.
This one sounds like those of an Indian hotel concierge, quickly giving directions to a lodging tourist on how best to spend an economic holiday.
Silence accentuates the accent.

The knuckles of whoever is knocking are dry.
The dry-knuckled person has gnarled dark brown hands, hands that smell of metal and have an unusually pale palm.
The dark sun-burnt skin ridges over serpentine veins. The wrist juts out.
The elbows are bony and thicker than the rest of the arm.

The hand looks like a bare tree in winter, asking the heavens with its last ounce of hope and its last resort of belief for some sweet rain.
Its bare branches spread, earnestly praying, as it looks up to the cold, stern and clear blue sky.
-- The sky, who wouldn’t budge left or right from the rules of the world, unless budged by bigger powers.
Still, the trees close their eyes and fervently pray for some benevolence,
their wordless hope searching out some fugitive miracle.

Clutching at air.

The knuckles are parched, dry, cracked and drained of color.
Dark, like coagulated blood on its way to thicken into a hardened scab.
Scabs that shouldn’t be pried open or they’ll start bleeding again.
Old wounds, their hearts laden with the guilty secret dream of living forever.
Their enthusiasm doesn’t mellow like long left-open soft drinks.
They’re wounds that can’t be buried under time as one may bury biodegradable trash. They’re non-biodegradable.
They’re like those brave letters who, upon ending up stranded and unsent, serve to flatter the frail courage of the writer when occasionally unfolded.

The wounds are as old as the oldest women alive.
They don’t speak to each other.
They don’t show the tendency to open their mouths to communicate.
They just wait..
Ever so patiently.
Their ability to speak is exhausted.
Their ability to get exhausted is exhausted.

The knocks keep rapping on wood.
The knuckles have taken on a cause to wear the wood down by simple insistence.
And nothing else.

Knock knock knock.