1 CLEANING DAY

Fumes of mild misty dust filled the enclosed air of the old attic of a suburban home, gently obscuring old boxes that lay exposed and scattered beneath the feet of a young lady clad in a white blue gown as she kept rummaging through the croaked wooden walls with dirty broom. She wore a black face mask on her face to prevent the thick foggy dust from getting into her lungs in large quantity and bent her waist near the open window beside two old wooden closets which rested upon the coarse blue paint of the old wall. Her red hair remained neatly tied with a blue ribbon without being swayed her rapid movements of sweeping off sand and old junk towards the exit. Realizing that she was getting exhausted by the constant sweeping, she paused to relapse her rapid breath and took two steps away from the trash towards the tall closets where she quietly rested her back against the smooth but worn-out fires of wood preventing her from falling to the open wall.

She noticed a tiny ringlet of her hair fondling her eyebrows and brushed it aside away from her left eye with her fingers partly covered with dry dust particles since the small room was still filled with stagnant dust swaying gently in the air and partially glittered in the early morning sunlight which penetrated into the dusty room through an exposed area of the open window.

She took a brief moment to peer at the muddled arrangement of stacked old cartons containing countless old items of her childhood memories and those that were owned by her already dead parents staring back at her from inside the cartons most of which was exposed for her to see and gasped out much of the depressed air out of her lungs that was trying to compress her bosom, not only because of the foggy dust which swirl irregularly in the sunlight that penetrated into the attic from a window behind the old closet which was widely opened for the dust to find their way out of the tight spaced cubicle, but as a result of her personal problems much of which she had been struggling to cope with despite her disposition of earning some monthly paid cash from her well paid monthly job as an editorial manager in charge of a small group of a little staff team of experts within the admistrative structure of a Television company located in the same central area of Geneva though the issues that she encountered few weeks and which got her mind thinking of a possible solution to the problem, had inevitably forced her into solitude in such a way that she found it very hard to deliver herself from.

Then she heaved a sigh of distress as she glanced through the heap of untidy items that completely filled the entire empty space in the room making it a bit more uncomfortable for her to breath freely and made her work more tougher than ever for she had only spent three hours into the afternoon of tediously clearing only a smaller section within the fairly wide attic but regardless of the fact that she had a lot of work in her hands, she resumed nevertheless and took her broomstick which stood beside her the entire time she had decided to take a brief rest from sweeping off dust from the dirty worn out floorboard for the past three hours with her broomstick.

With a renewed strength and dogged courage to complete the herculean task in spite of feeling doubtful of ever finishing up cleaning the whole attic before the end of the day till sundown, at an hour she hoped to make her evening meal rather than to order one without having to spend her income lavishly on food items she knew deeply would rob her of her budgeted earnings for the month including apart from other bills, She dusted off the dirty scraps from the surface of the old closet skillfully using her broom to wipe off the dirt away from the wooden bodily surface of the closet leaving it neat and tidy enough to enable the remaining surviving part of its corroded beauty to be fully recovered though much of its surfaces had been worn out by time and other consumable agents especially tiny wood eating insects dwelling in the inner wooden fires of the old wardrobe.

Afterwards, she faced the old boxes, shifting them aside for her to sweep the dirt on the floorboard once again and succeeded in getting most of the sand being brushed away in direction of the exit whilst removing the old boxes from the path of the broom one after the other till she was a bit far off from where first started. She could have contacted a dustman to help her clean up the attic which had gotten a lot dirtier than it used to be back in the day when her parents were still very much alive to help out with the cleaning of the house especially the attic where they had kept most of their personal stuff and other valuable memorable items alongside other old things that they had used before getting new ones but she didn't want the burden of having to pay for the cleaning affect her income in any way possible since she had set her mind in paying for the household bills than a cleaning job, those of which deemed relevant for her to spend on for the week since her savings in the bank were running low and would not be sufficient enough to last her the entire month in financing most of her bills.

Though she wanted to cut her expenses short by not hiring a dustman to deal with the dusty room, part of her actually intended to to do the cleaning herself in order to exercise her weary bones especially her waist that had gone a bit stiff sitting down all day at the office at work which had inflicted fatigue into her body without her knowledge while working endlessly at the office till she felt the gruesome effects of her sitting position and took her friend's advice to engage herself with some exercise that would help free her stiffened joints and reduce her stress which she often came home with whenever she closes from work.

Without wasting much of her time, she quickly turned towards some gigantic cobwebs which lay spread out on the four corners of the old ceiling thirty four minutes after she was done gathering the dirt to a single spot where she planned to compile all the dirt into a two large black polythene bags before taking them to the trash dumpster outside in the front yard except for some old cartons containing some stuffs including a container housing bundles of old cyclical gramophone discs of the beetles song tracks used by her father to listen to the beetles album in the early 70s that were placed together with other dross things especially an little old dusty chest her father used to take along with him to the barracks after the second World War and began removing them with her broomstick one after the other till the room became more tidier than though the old closet still remained glued to the wall near the window as well as some old maps on top of it which she purposely did not removed since she had left it there without any intention of destroying it but rather to have it placed in the cellar beneath the house while some leftover irregular stacks of old boxes remained yet to be thoroughly cleaned and arranged at the right corner beside the enclosed door that led downstairs to the other upper compartments in the house.

She promptly stopped for a while to take a breath and head towards the huge when she was done gathering some more strength to continue the clean up, trampling softly on the floorboard which creaked as she walked whilst ignoring the creaky noise came each time she stepped on the ground and which had kept resounding in the room the entire time she was cleaning up after she stepped into the attic with her cleaning tools before noon for she had taken a day off from work to eke out time to do some housework.