The Scarlet Woman

The Scarlet Woman

Today was tiring day for me. I work in a car washing as car cleaner, and I had a duty to clean up a dirty jeep was filled with the soil at the bottom of the car, when it was time for hours after work. I cannot complain because I didn’t want to argue with my boss.

As usual after I finished my work, I changed my work clothes with the same outfit when I went to work. I return to riding my bike to get to my apartment where I lived alone. Arriving there after I parked my bike in parking lot, and then I headed to go to my apartment was on the seventh floor out of ten floors. I rode the elevator to get there, when I reached the seventh floor I walked down in the hall to my apartment, and then I saw a pair of red shoes belong to a woman beside front of my apartment, where nobody who occupied the apartment previously.

The lights in the town lit up, it can see in the window of my apartment which signified night started coming. My stomach started to hunger and then I decided to go to a restaurant where it's not far from here for dinner. Arriving at the restaurant I was sitting at the dining table while I was choosing a food menu I saw a woman wearing black clothes and long hair shoulder length. When I was eating with my head toward to the plate, then there was a woman wearing red shoes that past me and then I remembered that was the woman who had just stayed in front of my apartment and I thought immediately turned and she was gone and then I saw a woman who was in the corner is not there anymore and it turned out she was the one who passed me was wearing red shoes. She’s my new neighbor.

My dinner was done I went to my apartment. Arriving there I walked straight into my apartment and had no visible red shoes again, I think she had inside in her apartment with her shoes. Today I’m so tired because my job. I turn on the turntable to play a LP "Chelsea Girls from Nico" to a conductor of my thinking about my new neighbor such as what she is, because I was so curious about her and maybe I wanted to know her.

Next morning I woke up from my sleep, and then I open the window, suddenly I look crowded once people were gathering under this apartment, I saw there was a traffic accident I thought. With curiosity I went straight down. On I arrived outside the apartment, I asked someone the old man "what’s happening there?" He told me there was a woman hit by a bus. I was immediately rushed there to see it, I was so surprised that she is my new neighbor yet I know her and last night I’ve seen but I can’t saw her face anyway. She was already dead by the position of her body upside down and strangely her red shoes still on her feet, I saw the red blood had flooded her body and the police began to evacuate.

Hendi Kurniawan

0411 14 061 / C