AUTUMN BLOOD

 AUTUMN BLOOD

       Chapter ONE

"What a racket!" old Edward thought after standing in the hallway and listening for several minutes. Quickly, he then took the four steps to the front door and opened it just halfway, peeking out. People with red faces were running up and down the stairs. Some wore shoes, others did not. Some of them were crying, others were screaming right out.

"What's going on?!" Edward shouted.

"Somebody has been MURDERED. It´s in the laundry room!"  a barefoot girl unbeknownst to Edward hollered to him, with her chemically stiffened purple hair protruding in a little tuft towards the sky, tightly holding the sleeves of her modern dark blue duffel with both hands, whose nails had zebra patterns painted on them.

"Murdered??

Someone..."

"Yes," she said. She had stopped at his floor – third - because she had hurt a toe a little. "It's probably best if you stay inside," she said dismissively and cruelly, and Edward thought he must look ghastly, as he often thought himself nowadays when he looked at himself in the mirror, and that she also was treating him like a nobody. Perhaps that's why Edward – in a bit of anger - quickly grabbed his keys from inside the apartment and hasted out into the hallway, locked his door, and, in pushing the purple – or rather violet - girl aside, went over to knock on his neighbor Castor's door, right in the midst of the wild frenzy of mainly young people wearing peculiar designer clothes, racing up and down the stairs.

The elevator jerked violently between two floors, with a lone police officer banging on the gate and walls inside it. Castor opened his door just a crack. He looked scared. The cruel zebra girl disappeared downstairs, where another door soon slammed shut, indicating that she, after all, lived in the lower regions of the building, which had a total of seven floors and was built by functionalists in 1940.

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Autumn arrives, grey and cold. It always does. The immense autumn. Time for summary, time for accountability, when many walk through the city streets in the evenings surrounded by a dark purple glow. Autumn is a wonder, but it is also a disruption in this wonder, for autumn itself is the mystery that so carelessly follows the wonderful gift of summer, and it is simultaneously on its way to something else. Therefore, while summer is a goal, autumn is a plan. 

 (  på svenska: Höstdrama". Finns i nätbokhandeln som ebok och paperback.)