Empty House

Empty House

She walked through the door. The dog raised her head, whined and thumped her tail against her bed. It wasn't an excited wag and she didn't run to greet her. Had she forgotten so soon?

She couldn't locate the comforting smell of the house. Retentive smells of clean laundry, the aroma of delicate air fresheners, leftover wafts of morning showers and cooked breakfasts, and furniture polish. It wasn’t there; the smell that was unique to this house was gone. It was as though the soul had left and only the building remained. It was empty.

Everybody was—gone.

She moved quietly through the hall. Her artwork still hung on the walls. The tall,telephone table with its barley-twist legs stood as it always had, with a vase of fresh flowers sitting neatly on top of it.

Moving into the lounge, the sunshine blazed a spotlight beam into the middle of the carpet. There should have been a prima donna pirouetting, taking center-stage advantage of the ray of focused light. Gazing at the sunlight, she watched a few dust nodes flittering, doing their own version of the nutcracker, using up the space of the absent ballerina.

The room was warmed by the sun, as bright and cheery as it had ever been, yet the eyes of the china figurines looked through her as though she wasn’t there, as though she had never existed. The plump, well stuffed settee dared her to leave a bottom indentation in its neatness.

The room bore the pictures that she had painstakingly created, ornaments that she had collected, things that she had worked for—but it was empty of her.

A noise startled her; she looked for somewhere to hide. Her sneaking peep into the house was meant to be just that, a quick in and out again without getting caught.

She shouldn’t be here and didn't want to be seen in this place where she no longer belonged.

But, it was so completely familiar.

Karen came in from school and dropped her bag, as usual, in the hall. She didn't need to see the thing to know that it was there. She’d heard it being dropped so many times before, followed by her chiding voice asking Karen to pick it up and put it away properly.

Looking at the great scheme of things, how important had that been? What could she have said instead, to make better use of those wasted seconds? I love you? You can do whatever you put your mind to doing and don't ever let anybody tell you differently? There were so many things that she should have said.

The door was flung open and Karen flounced in, took a flying leap, and flung herself onto the settee. Something else she would have nagged about. It didn't matter.

Steve, two years younger, came tearing in fast on her heels. They scuffled over prime position on the sofa. A flick of the remote control and they sat like a pair of disgruntled bookends, one at either end, each kicking out at the other just to keep the mini war active while they watched the children's early evening programs.

Stevie’s hair was too long, it flopped into his eyes. He was her baby. How she wished she'd held him more, ruffled his hair, shown him more affection, but at fourteen he’d almost died of shame every time she tried to touch him. Still, sometimes, when there was nobody else around, he’d leaned into her as they had watched television, proving that he still had a need of her.

Just memories.

The house was empty. They were nothing more than ghosts of the past.

Sarah looked lovingly at her quarreling children and moved silently out of the room.

Then she left as she had entered, by walking through the closed front door, moving towards her new reality.