A lone ray of sunlight was the only thing that managed to slip inside the boarded-up studio apartment. Its scant light shone through one of the gaps between the decayed wooden planks that blocked every possible entrance, illuminating the cold cheek of a man sprawled across the floor of the almost pitch-black room.
Traces of how the man had lived within that very space - the way he slept, the way he read his interior design books, the way he clipped articles from the local newspaper - remained vivid.
The bed was unmade, with bread crumbs carelessly sprinkled all over the sheets. Ants have already created a food trail across the bedsheets and slowly made off with the remaining remnants of raisin bread. A folder stuffed full of newspaper clippings perched unobstrusively on one corner of the bed, as if the project that it held with its binders was already finished and ready for review.
The desk placed conveniently beside the bed was cluttered with pens, highlighters, and pieces of newspaper clippings. Several books of interior design and architecture were reverently arranged according to size on the desk's shelf, each hardbound volume of considerable size and thickness enough to make them viable tools for self-defense.
The entire studio was a place of study and mental toil; there were no television sets, no means of communication save for a mobile phone whose battery has run dry, no portable gaming devices to balance out the highly skewed ratio between work and relaxation that had transpired within the place.
The apartment was a perfectly ordinary college student's apartment, if it weren't for the fact that its occupant was already in an advanced state of decomposition - a pile of rotting meat - with the wood parquet floor underneath already steeped in the cadaver's foul, thickened blood. The man's face looked as if he were merely sleeping, totally oblivious to the maggots that have already infested his slowly decaying body and the flies that swarmed and laid eggs onto the festering flesh.
Papers lay scattered all across the floor, each piece colored a deep, crimson red with blood that clotted and darkened into a rich red brown around the edges. Upon closer inspection, the papers reveal prints and diagrams of what looked like various kinds of doors: bifold, French, pocket, among many others.
The presence of reddened sheets of paper made up for the absence of roses - a fitting funeral for a person whose existence was never fully acknowledged by the rest of the world. At least, the world other than the one that lay beyond the black door in the far corner of the room that, mysteriously enough, was the only door left unopened.
