Empty Rooms
WD February Flash Fiction Challenge — Day 3
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My footsteps echoed through the empty house as I made my way from room to room making sure everything was out. The movers had arrived in the morning and with a ruthless efficiency, removed every last trace of Elizabeth in an obscenely short time.
I had moved myself out eighteen months ago, when she first found out about me and Alicia, my latest and greatest mistake. I’ve made plenty of them, mistakes that is, but that one was truly the undoing of me.
Climbing down the stairs, I took a seat partway down, unable to go any further. Sadness and regret swept over me and I let out a deep moan, glad that the young man who had cleaned the carpets after the movers had wrapped up had left awhile ago, taking with him the encyclopedia set and a collection of Books of the Western World that I’d bought for our kids — all grown now with no need for such relics.
Elizabeth is a wonderful woman, a saint really. She has never done anything to deserve the hand that I dealt her. She gave me her unreserved love, deep and powerful enough to pull me through twelve years of medical school and a decade of building a successful practice, all the while birthing and raising our three children, keeping our house and our lives in order. She gave me complete devotion, and I gave her a treacherous heart.
She is married now, to a great guy, a man whose wife had died of cancer. They’d met at church and he has proven to be a better husband and father than I ever was.
If regret and sorrow were a tangible, physical thing, mine would fill up this empty house until there was no room to breathe. Maybe it is, for I found breathing very difficult in that moment. It would be a mercy, I thought, to die here, in this mausoleum of my misery, this sarcophagus of my sorrow. I could just close my eyes and breathe no more and let all my sins decay with the building, as it slowly dissolved into the earth.
But it cannot be so, for after the movers of today, come the movers of tomorrow, with the worldly possessions of another family. May theirs be a happier and more blessed life than mine has been. I feel like carving into the parquet floor, “Be faithful to one another, and never stray.”
With that thought, I heaved myself up off the stairs, and exited the front door, locking the door to my old life, and returning the keys to the lockbox. Chapter over. Turn the page.
This is Day Three of the Writer’s Digest February Flash Fiction Challenge. The prompt is “write a story that takes place that takes place in the aftermath of something huge.” I wrote it on the 9th. There’ll be another this evening. Stay tuned!
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