The World of the Wood

Still today when i hear a fire alarm i can feel my heart pounding wildly. This story began when i was around four. For that time i lived with my family, my parents, two elder brothers, and my grandma in a house which was built in a first floor. Below it there was a furniture-factory. It was called The World of the Wood. The house was a middle-class one, with nothing particularly important. Common furniture as common as the rest of the things that were there. There was a big kitchen, where my mother used to prepare delicious cakes. At the back a middle court, where my grandma had her plants and some time she had also had a little yellow bird in a small cage which had been eaten by an unknown cat. (after that she only kept the plants). Finally, three bedrooms, a hall with a big mirror, and a living room with an enormous table. I spent all my childhood there, so a lot of things happened there.
One day i was in the kitchen with my mother, cooking something surely, when we saw a tremendous black smoke coming from the court. We went out and we realized it was rising from the factory. When i saw the look on my mother’s eyes I felt in danger, that something was wrong.

My mother was a special woman. She was that kind of people who used to live life in a heavy way. She used to turn nervous very easily. The first sign of her transformation happened on her face, more precisely, on her eyes. When something disturbed her, the looking of her eyes changed completely. Her brown eyes began to shine in a peculiar way until they stared at someone. Then, they became terrified. The horror could be seen on them. That morning she looked just like that.

Some seconds later we were waking up one of my brothers, he was still asleep. I have to say it was hard work to do with him generally: get up you! What’s going on? Come on, wake up! Don’t bother me mom…please… Suddenly my mother took the sheets from my brother’s bed out and threw them on the floor. What’s up? The factory is burning. The-fac-to-ry? Yes…The World of the Wood…is burning…the whole world seems to be burning… Oh…yes…that’s the reason i felt too hot, said my brother while he began to put his clothes on.

The three of us went out to the street. A lot of people were there. I can’t be sure if there were too many people, but i felt as if a crowd were around my home. The firemen had begun to work. My mother took my hand tightly and left me in Francis’s house. He lived with his family -parents and a little sister- on the opposite side of the street. During those summer afternoons we had spent a lot of time together riding on our bikes across the neighborhood. That time we sat on the threshold and kept there almost the day long.

That is the last image i remember since the smoke broke out until i see me sitting in the kitchen, keeping in silence, dumb. But this is another story that deserves another place.

The burning of the furniture factory is pretty different than other kind of burnings. It seems as if the whole world were burning. So is the fire alarm. It is very different than other alarms. I mean, i can recognize it perfectly. The others have a different sound. When i hear an ambulance or a police alarm, nothing really happens with me. Even more, i can’t be sure about what kind of alarm is. Nevertheless, when i listen to a fire alarm, everything changes inside me. My body begins to shake, my heart begins to pound strongly, and my whole head becomes silent as if it were dumb. On that occasion a horror feeling traps me heavily. This dumb sound really upsets me. This sound rarely leaves me alone. I mean, i can feel myself completely alone in front of a terrible danger, which comes to me as if it were a ghost. Like a ghost of a death person whom I had sometime loved. Just like that this ghost comes to me, it meets me, but it can never touch me, entirely.