Flash Fiction #2
Ghost Town
We were the last ones to pack up and leave. We didn’t even bother boarding up the windows and doors, because there was no one left to do the pillaging and nothing really left to loot. So quickly, too little had become too much. Too much quiet, too many rustles and creaks, and too often having to ask, did you just see that. Please tell me you just saw that.
The first year, we thought our little family could make do. We would read Walden and we would embrace our fate and we would make do. That second Christmas, when it was just the two of us again, as we sat there in that stony, awful silence I realized that grief can take your breath away but regret is a gentler, more steadfast, quietly desperate companion. Regret is what really suffocates you, day after day.
It was enough to drive a person crazy, and I think by the time we finally left, maybe we were, a little.
We were the last ones to pack up and leave. We didn’t even bother boarding up the windows and doors, because there was no one left to do the pillaging and nothing really left to loot. So quickly, too little had become too much. Too much quiet, too many rustles and creaks, and too often having to ask, did you just see that. Please tell me you just saw that.
The first year, we thought our little family could make do. We would read Walden and we would embrace our fate and we would make do. That second Christmas, when it was just the two of us again, as we sat there in that stony, awful silence I realized that grief can take your breath away but regret is a gentler, more steadfast, quietly desperate companion. Regret is what really suffocates you, day after day.
It was enough to drive a person crazy, and I think by the time we finally left, maybe we were, a little.