A crimson rain streamed like a violently red ribbon across the tiles, puddling in the cracks, tracing dark, curving swirls across dirt-smeared creases. The walls were a pale mint green and oddly bare. This empty room was once meant to be a laundry room of sorts, and if you close your eyes you see not a dying man, but a prim, fussy lady in a crisp dress folding white, lacey laundry. The window was once clear and unbroken, and the curtains fluttered ivory lace in detergent-scented breeze. A family photograph hung neatly above the unblemished laundry machine, humming coolly between the swirling towels. The white tiles were smooth against soft bare-feet, warm with the heat from the thrumming drier and the shimmering warmth dripping from the open window. The air tasted clean and crisp against your tongue and no words hung in the air, only the pad of bare feet and the pulse of the machines.
You would not think of that tranquil place and that delicate lady when you see this room now. Time has not been gentle, as the years slipped and slid past, and the silver rain washed away the lemon yellow paint on the outside of the house, this room faded like its photographs. The walls had lost their minty sheen and the tiles cracked and crinkled, broken fragments of a pretty tile design lost among the many minutes that separated it from its former. The laundry equipment and those lovely curtains had long been removed as the proper lady’s grandchildren sold the place and no one bothered to buy it. “Too stiff” they insisted, “too old” others squawked, and some just simply shook their heads and moved on to newer places with unloved laundry rooms without even a hint of green paint. The narrow window had been broken long ago by who knows what. Ugly graffiti was scrawled like dripping blood on the peeling walls, slogans of a revolution long gone. The family photograph was missing too, somehow, as if someone had thought stealing it might shame this house further. And now he lay dying on the cold, broken tiles and there was nothing anybody could do to save him.