For Sale

Bits and pieces of a person’s life — perhaps a life former; that’s what he feels looking at garage sales. Looking at a antique lamp he considered it was too vintage for his room. But he decided to ask the entrepreneur of the temporary franchise, “Isn’t this valuable?”

“It’s a nice art piece replica. You can paint the statue of the thinker in colours to make it retro.”
“I rather not.” he giggled.

That’s when his eye looked at a very illuminative lava-lamp, “Hey this is neat.” he picked it up and surveyed it.

The man looked at him suspiciously and then grew a bit hesitant, “You want it. I’m not so sure of that old wreck. I’m selling it cheap.”

“Well, it looks good.” he looked at the luminosity of the lamp, “It looks really good.”

“Yeah, Yeah...ummm that’s three dollars.” the man just scratched his head and said eagerly, “You gonna take it or not. “

“Yeah sure.”

The man looked relieved and he wondered why, “Hey, is there something wrong with this lamp?” he looked stern, “If there is I’ll come and give it back.”

“Yeah, sure.” the garage sale man smiled.

Back home he settled the lava-lamp next to his bed and decided to do his chores. It was quite neat doing such chores as this was a new apartment. Soon, he fixed dinner and after eating decided to go to bed. The lava-lamp was a great sort of night light. But while getting into bed he was slicing an apple when his hand got cut. “Ouch.” but before he knew it a weird magnetism drew his hand to the lava-lamp and a drop of his blood fell on it. The lava-lamp started to burn brighter. “Wow, that was amazing!” he was pretty impressed by the mechanism, Does it run on blood? He should have been more fearful than curious.

Day by day he got sicker. Whenever he slept he woke up feeling worse. But the lava-lamp glowed brighter and brighter as he started looking more emaciated.

“Terrance, you are losing a lot of blood; are you a cutter or something?”

“No Doctor, I never did anything like that.” he looked quite shocked.
“Well, you fainted in class because you are losing massive amounts of blood. I want you to do these tests and Terrance you need to get blood as soon as possible. Here, go to the hospital and get some today.”

But Terrance did not go. He knew the culprit and he was gonna get rid of it.

He got the lamp and drove to that house which was having the garage sale. However, the house was empty as it was being sold!

“Hey, what happened to the old resident?” he asked the realtor.
“That young man was getting sick so he decided a change of climate was needed; don’t mind me saying but you look pretty unwell yourself...” suddenly she got dizzy, “That’s funny I feel kinda exhausted.”

Terrance realized it was the lamp. He ran off with it and got to an alley and threw it in the garbage “There good riddance!”

The lava-lamp glowed tremendously and soon a pair of red strings came out and bound themselves to Terrance, “Hey! Hey! No!”

Terrance felt the lamp draining his blood. Terrance struggled but it was useless. Soon everything became dark and cold.

The police found Terrance’s cold, bloodless body to be a serious enigma. The more enigmatic was the lava-lamp a few meters away glowing bright red as blood as if all was right in the world.

[595 words]