The Room of Odd

The rest of the house is perfectly normal, so you wouldn’t suspect what lies at the end of the hallway. Everything in it is something else. I’ve only been there once. When I asked if I could go again, I was told that that would be impossible, like it had moved away or something. A room can’t move itself out of a house, can it?

The sofa is a giant pair of red lips. ‘Oh, I’ve seen those before,’ scoffed a boy eating an ice cream, even though we were told not to enter the room with food or drink. “There’s nothing new about a sofa like this.” And to prove it, he sat down heavily in the middle of the lips.

There was a sucking noise and the boy disappeared. He wasn’t eaten or anything gruesome like that; he was found later on the street. But his ice cream had gone.

The mirror was the cause of a lot of bruised heads. You think it’s a window, because you can see out into the garden rather than back into the room. But then you see yourself in it, in the garden and feel very confused.

The table walks around on its stalky legs and rubs against you like a cat. If you put something on it, it remains stock still until you remove it, then it continues its journey to find something else to bear. The tea cups and mugs drink whatever you put inside them, the cushions squeal if you so much as touch them and the radio, an old-fashioned one that you don’t notice at first, breaks into compositions of its own making. It doesn’t have a very pleasant singing voice but you can’t turn it off.

I wanted the lips-sofa to swallow me too, but it didn’t. Perhaps you have to be really annoying. 

I wonder if it would swallow the radio?