Block of Six
an excerpt

She pushed rebellious strands of brown hair out of her face and followed the natural cracks in the floorboards underneath her chest of drawers. And she frowned. There was something underneath the chest of drawers, something that shouldn’t be there. And she knew it shouldn’t be there because she didn’t keep anything under there. It was too dusty. Lorna rolled off her bed onto her feet and padded across in her socks to the large piece of furniture. She knelt down and gingerly felt underneath. Her fingers grazed a hard plastic object. A hard plastic object which felt cube shaped. She pulled the cube shaped object out from under the drawers and stared at it. A face of nine mis-matched coloured squares stared back at her.

“What the hell?” She said aloud, turning the Rubik’s Cube over in her hand. At least that’s what she thought it was. She’d never actually seen a Rubik’s Cube but she’d heard about them. They were a huge thing in the seventies, or eighties or something. Standing up, bringing the cube with her, Lorna sat down on her computer chair and span it lazily from side to side with her feet as she studied the object. Or rather followed various trains of thoughts as to where the cube had come from. It certainly wasn’t hers. And it wasn’t dusty enough to have been under the chest of drawers for a long time. She wondered if it belonged to her parents but that raised the question as to why they would have left it in her room and how it would have gotten kicked under the drawers without anyone noticing? Lorna frowned and placed it on her desk. Unfortunately she placed it on top of a pen causing both the cube and the pen to promptly roll off the desk and strike the floor with a loud thud. She scowled and bent to retrieve the objects. The pen was fine but the fall had caused one of the sides of the cube to turn slightly. Lorna pushed the side all the way through it’s turn and turned to drop it back on her desk.

The Rubik’s Cube was hurriedly returned to the hardwood floor as Lorna’s hands flew up to hide the scream which emitted from her throat.

Her desk. Her beautiful dark oak wood desk, was now coloured a deep red.