Welcome to Paradise

The room was dimly lit from a shaft of the afternoon sunlight piercing through a broken slat of the grimy Venetian blinds obscuring the window. Assorted jackets were hung over the back of a squashy sofa which filled much of the cramped living space. The seat was pointing at a television set standing in the corner, old and battered with a few buttons missing; it had received a lot of use over time though the remote hadn’t been seen for years.


Heat poured through the whole room, the mercury thermometer hanging on the back of the door was reaching new heights and the warmth was so dense it could almost be seen. The lonely fan had finally given out the previous day although the feeble wisps of cool air it produced had been barely noticed when it was working so nobody could summon the energy to be bothered by it; they were just too hot and uncomfortable to care.


A thin film of dust coated the few surfaces in the room; a worn dresser and cheap plastic coffee table, the sweltering heat had obviously been too much for the cleaners and they didn’t care about it anyway. After all, they weren’t staying there so what did it matter to them? They had at least changed the bedding, although there were still some suspect stains tainting the lurid flowery pattern.


A few flies buzzed noisily behind the blinds which had been pulled all the way down in a futile attempt at creating some shade and cooling the room down. The flies were trapped, stuck behind the cheap slats, aimlessly flying to and fro searching for an exit. A fly swat had been promised, but the broken strip of plastic that had finally turned up proved so ineffective it had been disregarded and now lay somewhere beneath the sofa, providing an interesting new object and plaything for the family of cockroaches that resided there.


Through the window, the promised swimming pool was devoid of both people and water and by the look of the growing fauna sprouting through the cracked tiles; it had been that way for a long time. The few deck chairs which still surrounded the pool were now nothing more than broken plastic, providing scant shelter and refuge for the groups of bugs and beetles that scuttled through the dirty white pieces to bask in the welcoming summer sun.


Scattered across the coffee table, in between the old mug stains and rent-a-car keys were the various leaflets given in the welcome pack. The top one showed a large photo of the local railway museum and beneath that, a pamphlet detailing the nearby butterfly sanctuary with glossy pictures of smiling families and the inevitable map and directions. Lying askew amongst them was the brochure for the vacation, still lying open where it had been left the day before. Emblazoned across the top of the page were three words in large, appealing lettering:

“Welcome to Paradise”

Word Count: 484