A sound like oak wood

The dark hues of the hallway that morning felt very much more like a night. The silence gave me focus. Even when the noise of her shuffling leather backpack, the one my dad had used in high school, filled my ears, it wasn’t all spread out like noises usually are. It was narrow and went straight to the point. The hall was narrow too. We walked straight through it with the clean, fresh feeling of a new beginning, out into the warm, dark, quiet morning of her last day on earth.