DARKNESS, AND NOTHING MORE
The final version of my story, awarded with the lovely letter A. Enjoy :)
It was a cold December morning when memories of past mistakes washed back up onto my mental shore. I had been ignoring them for years, the things that had gone before. It wasn’t as if I’d completely forgotten their existence, I just refused to acknowledge it. For the last few years I’d managed to build some sort of vaguely happy life; but this morning, this one fateful morning in the cold December, a passing memory, a shadow, a ghost of a life long since left behind came back to haunt me. It started as a funny feeling in the back of my mind, as I was walking along the footpath that led back to my apartment, a passing thought that made me stop for a second, as if something had occurred to me. I stood there for a moment, puzzled, shook myself and walked on. It was only as I was nearing the entrance to my building that it struck me. I looked back the way I had come, to see the cause of my stray thought disappearing around the corner. A sudden wave of emotion washed over me as I recalled things long since buried in the back of my mind. She looked just like her. It couldn’t be her, it was impossible, but nonetheless the resemblance was unmistakeable. I shook myself, and entered my building, whereupon entering my apartment it came to the front of my mind again. I quickly closed the door and sunk to the floor, feeling that cold, bleak emptiness that I had felt at the time, and quite a while after the fact, come creeping back into my mind. I curled myself into a ball, wishing it would go away, but it did not. I wondered why this had come back to haunt me after all this time, I had been doing well. I screamed it in my head over and over again.
There was no answer of course; I was talking to nothing, I was talking in my head, my thoughts were overwhelmed with sadness and I couldn’t fight it, I couldn’t stop, I was supposed to be numb, I was supposed to forget, I didn’t want to remember, I couldn’t remember, it would only…
“Why?!” I shouted, one cold, harsh scream in the emptiness of my apartment.
“Because it is almost time.”
I jolted, startled. The voice was soft, melodic, just like hers. It couldn’t be… I looked up.
Nothing.
There was no one there. Of course there wasn’t, I was being silly. This was just a passing thing, a passing wave of remembrance that would subside within the hour.
But it did not. Not within the hour, not within the day, not within the week. For a whole week I walked around with this hole, this emptiness inside of me, catching fleeting glimpses of sounds, sights, smells, that reminded me of her. When I went to sleep at night, a fretful sleep, filled with painful things, I thought I could hear her voice whispering to me in the silent darkness of my room. Sometimes I would yell, I would scream for an explanation, but there was nothing.
The silence was deafening.
I made my decision, after a week of torment, I got out of bed, and in the shadow of the bleak December night I made my way down to the alleyway, the emptiness gnawing at me like a dog with a particularly tough bone. I passed a building with a well-watered garden, picked a single magnolia, her favourite, walked a bit further down the street and turned into the alleyway. The alleyway I had avoided for the last five years, an alleyway filled with echoes of a forgotten trauma, except they were not echoes any longer, and it was not forgotten. I knelt down and placed the flower on the exact spot where it had happened. Rising to my feet again, I whispered to the darkness of the alleyway, whispered to the shadows, whispered to the ghosts of my past.
“Tell me. Give me something. I need something. Why can’t you let me be? Why can’t you let me live my life? Why can’t I be at peace?”
“Because I am not at peace.”
The voice was unmistakeable. It had to be hers; no other creature on earth had that soft, melodic tone that her voice possessed. I could sense something behind me, but I was afraid to turn around.
“I poured my heart out at the funeral. I wept, I mourned, for weeks on end, and after that I felt empty for a long time. There was an inherent coldness about my world. But then I got up, I moved on, because I had to, we as people have to move on. You can’t live in the past; you’ve got to look to the future.”
There was a pause, like an eternity in the cold blackness.
“You can’t run from the past Edgar. Not forever.”
I couldn’t control myself any longer; I turned around slowly, fearing what I might see.
“I-“
It was her. It could be no one else. She was wearing the same clothes as that fateful day, her hair was fixed in the same position, but somehow she looked different, she looked paler. There was a pale, ghostly sheen about her, and the moonlight gave her an eerie glow.
“Do something for me Edgar.”
I was still trying to comprehend what was happening.
“Anything Evelyn, anything for you.”
I reached out to brush her hair out of her face, like I always did. It was colder than it used to be, it felt slightly surreal.
“I want to be at peace Edgar. Do this and I will be.”
I closed my eyes for a second, trying to shut out the emptiness that was still nagging at my brain.
“What do you want me to do?”
She looked at me and smiled, she smiled that radiant smile that she always gave me when she was content with something I had said.
“Thank you.”
I blinked for just a second, and in that single second it became as if she was never there. I was alone in the bleakness of that cold December night. I asked again, I shouted, I screamed until my face was blue, but she was gone. I asked once more, whispering it to the shadows.
Nothing.