A Girl Named Regret

Jan 30, 2010 14:22

I loved a girl named Regret once.

It was a long time ago.

So many lifetimes ago.

I was lost when I met her. All my days, what purpose had they ever had? Alone and empty, all I had done was like ash in my mouth; all my efforts had achieved nothing and meant less.

So I had driven out into the country to see the stars. You can’t see the stars properly in the city, even in a town there is too much light pollution, it washes out the night sky. Dilutes it.

But in the country the sky is full of stars, all bright and burning. You can even see the Milky Way clear, just like the river they all thought it was in the old times ages before there were cities.


I found this hill. It was a long way from anywhere with a flat top. There was a historical marker there where a car could safely pull over without presenting an obstacle or danger to other road users.

I seem to remember it was all green at the time though that was hard to see in the dark. There had been a drought for the longest time and the countryside had taken on a dried up brown colour. A change had finally come and it was all different shades of green again with patches of canola yellow or lavender where plants were flowering.

It was a clear night and cool with it but I sat on the bonnet of my car staring at the stars anyway. The chill didn’t mean that much.

I wanted to find something I had lost…maybe even never had. I wanted to find it again, whatever it was, in the stars.

That’s where she found me.

I don’t think I saw her coming she was just there.

‘Could you help me please,’ she said when I saw her there. ‘I need to get home.’

‘I’ll take you,’ I said, a careless but genuine offer.

‘No, I couldn’t ask that. I just need to use your phone if you have one. I need to call my sister to come and fetch me.’

‘No, it’s alright,’ I said, ‘its no trouble.’

‘Are you sure? It’s a long way to where I need to go. Only my sister is waiting for me.’

‘Yes,’ I said again. I got off my car and opened the door for her. ‘Get in, I’ll take you where ever you need to go.’

‘Why?’ she asked, hesitating for the last time.

‘Because I have nothing better to do. Because of the melancholy I feel tonight. Because I just want to do something, be with someone, go somewhere, however far it is, however long it will take. To have a purpose however brief.’ For her I would do anything, I swore it too myself.  ‘Where ever you need to go I will take you there.’

She smiled at me then, soft and gentle and sad and that was when I first loved her. ‘I’ll take care of your fuel. We have a long way to go.’

‘If you want,’ said, conceding that much for her sake.

She got into the car. I got behind the wheel. She turned to me.

‘My name is Regret,’ she said. ‘Just follow the road. It will take you where I need to go.’

‘Of course,’ I said and began the journey.

I love you Regret I did not say and drove into the night.

‘Why were you named Regret? It seems a strange name to give someone. Did your parents not love you?’

‘They loved us very much but they named me Regret and to my sister they gave the name Sorrow,’ she answered. ‘But they knew what we would be to any who met us so they gave us our true names.’

‘What do you mean,’ I asked.

‘We are regret and sorrow to all we meet,’ she said.

‘I have no regrets,’ I said but thinking I love you Regret but knowing I could not say it. It seemed sweeter this way.

She said nothing as we drove into the rising night mist.

There was a tollgate beyond the mist where a man waited.

‘Are you ready to pay the toll?’ he asked of me.

Yes, I would have said, for a smile from Regret, for a kind word or a touch of her hand I would pay any price, risk any cost, damn and despise the consequences. Wasn’t I showing how far I would go for Regret, without fail or question? Because loved her I would go all the way.

But she leaned over and said to the man at the gate, ‘He is with me, Threshold. Let him pass for he is taking me home.’

Beyond the tollgate a bridge crossed a wide chasm through which flowed a deep, dark river.

We drove on.

And we drove on into the new day.

The wasteland stretched out from the road reaching for the dim, distant horizon where mountains were hinted at in purple. Above the sky was shrouded in an unbroken haze of grey and brown while there was the tang of smoke and sulphur in the air we breathed.

‘There are fires in the north,’ she said. ‘They have been burning for the longest time.’

The light that came through the overcast was pallid and sickly and I knew we would not see the Sun again.

For a day and a night we drove along the road. The night was black. Neither star nor moon pieced the sky’s shroud. I drove on, following the road by headlight. It went straight with no branch or deviation. A strip of bitumen, its edges crumbling and a faded line of dots down the middle.

‘Do you have any other sisters?’ I asked to pass the time.

Mostly we drove in silence. She was looking out at the night bound world as it passed by, her face mirrored in the window.

‘Tears, Misery and Pain are my sisters,’ she said, ‘as well as Sorrow.’

‘Do you have any brothers?’ I asked wanting to know more of the one I loved.

‘My brothers are Wisdom, Learning, Experience and Growth.’

We drove on into another pale, pallid day.

Sometimes we would pass a house on the roadside. They were rough places made of weatherboard and corrugated iron. Sometimes there would be someone to watch us go by. A man in a chair, a woman hanging out washing, children that never played, sometimes even a dog or cow. They only ever watched. If we passed any in the night I never saw any lights. What life they could scrabble from the barren wastelands I will never know.

Once we passed an old man walking down the road. He had a hat and long coat and roll slung across his back. He had a long walking staff and a grey-muzzled dog walked with patience weariness at his side. They were wilderness lean and hardship weathered.

He looked our way with hooded eyes.

‘He is known to my family,’ said Regret when I asked if she knew him.

‘Never stop for the old man,’ she said when I asked I if should stop and offer him a lift as well.

So on we drove.

It was not the last I would see of him.

Time passed and the road went on.

We spoke occasionally, a few brief words here and there.

Seldom did my eyes venture from the road but to look at her.

Seldom did she turn from the passing wasteland except to speak a word, to hint at so much with tone or expression.

One day Regret said; ‘I have a lover.’

It began to rain - great black tears that stained and seared the barren earth.

‘Oh,’ was all I could say, wounded to be heart.

‘His name is Loneliness,’ she said. ‘I hardly ever see him.’

‘Oh,’ I said. How could any love Regret and not want to be with her every hour of every day? How could any dare take that smile form her face? I was angry at Loneliness. I hurt for Regret. I wanted nothing more than to strive against this cruelty on her behalf and show her there was perhaps another, a more deserving person.

But what could I say? So I said nothing and we drove on.

From time to time there were others I would pass on the road.

Drab, limp-wheeled gipsy wagons drawn by dispirited beasts that wore the shape of oxen.

Battered, rattletrap road-trains coloured with rust and the belch of diesel stacks.

Sometimes a giant, black-maned she-biker would thunder past yet each time there would be a different girl riding pillion behind her. When one looked back at us, at Regret, she said to me: All who ride with her look to me in the end.’ Thorny tumbleweeds would sometimes follow us, tumbling along our wake till they grew bored. Once there was a black rider cloaked in tatterdemalion rags and shadow upon a flame-eyed horse-beast that was little more than ragged skin and brittle bone. I thought I heard laughter as it passed, iron-clad hooves silently striking sparks from the bitumen road. In the dead, dark night I would occasionally catch hints of pale things at the edge of my headlights beams, they slouched hungrily as they followed the road.

And always, always there was that old man his long coat all travel stained and dusty with his grizzled old hound, always walking the road, on and on.

All past and gone in a moment.

All going the same way.

I never once met any oncoming traffic. The ever-distant mountains lay before us all.

And then it was done.

Regret looked ahead and said, ‘Sorrow is waiting for me.’

A woman stood by the road and I felt the anguish of a journey done with so little said and so much desired to be said that could not.

So I pulled over when we got to Sorrow and Regret got out of my car.

‘Thank you,’ said Regret with that smile of infinite sadness, full of unsaid could-have-been and maybe-ifs.

‘This is Sorrow. She is my sister.’

I was in no doubt of that, the family resemblance was clear.

She paused then and looked back at me. ‘I am sorry,’ she said. ‘I should have said no to your offer but I had to get back home to my sister.’

‘No regrets,’ said I with a smile, as I knew that I did not love Regret. Not anymore.  I could leave her there, with her sister and journey on to where ever.

‘There is no going back,’ she said. ‘The road only goes to one place.’

‘Where is that?’ I asked though I think I already knew.

‘Nowhere,’ she told me.

‘Then that is where I will go,’ said I in reply.

I have driven a long way since then along the road to nowhere through the desolate wasteland. I loved Regret for my time and though I never told her I think she knew. She never means to be cruel, it is just part of her nature. Sometimes one of Regret’s sisters or other kin might ride with me a ways. Grief, Experience, Longing…her family is large but they have kept her absent lover at bay and for that small mercy I am sometimes grateful. Loneliness is cruel, bitter and jealous.

Sometimes I see that old man and his dog forever following the road and sometimes I am tempted to stop for him, offer him a ride before I remember Regret’s warning. I think one day that that will not be enough.

I have heard a name for this place, a passenger told me once. Esgalia, it is an old and distant name, which means Place of No Return.

I think it has another more familiar name too.

regret road fiction short story empty jo

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