Hey there, I have nothing better to write about so heres a story that isn't leading anywhere. I started it... wednesday and then I just stopped. It's really depressing. It based on our negibors across the alley and sorta whats going on at their house since the husband left with the two kids. By the way Joe wins the contest, I dont know what his prize will be, somthing cheap I suppose.
WARNING: This story is really depressing so if you are in a really good mood dont read it cause it will set fire to your mood and burn it to the ground... and it is also REALLY LONG...
The back door of their three-bedroom house shuddered, as it slammed shut. Out the door walked her ex-husband, her ex-son, and her ex-daughter. The silence that filled the house was eerie like the calm after a hailstorm but she made no sound to end the awful silence. The kitchen tile seemed to leap up from to floor to make contact with her knees as she fell to the floor. In a dumbfounded silence she sat unable to move and her expressionless face reflected that fact. She loved her ex-husband and ex-children, or did she I mean they were the ones that had just walked out the door on her. She didn’t leave them they left her, maybe they were the ungrateful ones and they were at fault. She rationalized what had just happened to her and she felt slightly better. She mustered up the strength to lift herself off of the floor and grasp at the phone which she pulled off of the charger allowing it to fall to the floor and make a clattering noise as the thin plastic impacted the cold hard tile. The silence that followed the noise was deafening. Waiting for her ex-husband to come around the corner asking what the noise was she sat paralyzed on the kitchen floor. When the screaming silence passed she reached for the phone and dialed. Once again the silence was shattered but this time it did not paralyze her, she had become indifferent to the lack of sound in the once busy bustling home. On the other end of the line someone with a gruff sleep filled voice answered groggily, “Yeah?”, “They are gone…” she barely whispered into the phone receiver. “What?” replied the gruff voice. “They are gone”, she repeated this time in a voice just barely above a whisper. “Ok.” Replied the gruff voice, “I’ll be there in a little bit”. She sat, she listened to him hang up his end of the phone and listened to the silence, the silence envloped her live a blanket and then she knew that she had never been so alone.
Some time later the doorbell rang, she had barely moved at the sound. She had sat there on the floor for 20 or 30 minutes in silence not crying, not whimpering, not wavering, just sitting. She got up off the floor and opened the door to a man in his mid twenties with three to four days’ growth on his face. He wore a white T-shirt that was so worn that it was developing holes all over it. She held open the door and allowed him to enter. Once inside she closed the door and he pulled her closely kissed her. He pulled back from the kiss looking for the delighted little grin that he had become accustomed to when she called him with the message “The are gone.” But today when he leaned back from his kiss he saw no little smile and no sign of any recognition. “They are gone…” she murmured to herself, barely audible. “Yeah they are, that’s why you called me remember?” He kissed her again only to realize that her lips did not respond to his when they kissed, she merely lay there in his arms, her cold lips not responding to his. “They are gone…” she repeated. But this time she pointed to the pictures on the wall of her ex-family. When his eyes rose from her sunken face he saw only barren walls with no pictures of happy children, or family reunions, just barren walls. The words “Oh my god…” escaped his lips as he held her tighter. “Mary, oh my god…”
There they stood Mary, with her head buried in his chest. But she wasn’t crying even though she felt the tears inside her, she didn’t cry. Thomas had not expected to wake up from his hangover this morning, especially not to find that his girlfriend’s husband left her on top of that. Holding her in his arms he thought she was crying, “that’s good” he thought to himself, “girls need to cry some times, it makes them feel better”. He began to wonder what has caused Matt to leave. He at Matt worked together so he knew how good he was to Mary. On long nights at the fire station where they worked Matt would talk about the things Mary did to make him happy. What would have made him leave? Just then Mary lifted her head from the white T-shirt and said “Matt took the kids…” Mary whimpered “…he took the kids and isn’t coming back.” Still not crying Mary said, “Lets go to my room…” Mary took Thomas’ hand and led him down the dark hallway past the walls once adorned with pictures of her smiling boy James, and her beautiful daughter Allison. Thomas walked through the doorway into her bedroom passing Mary, who, standing in the doorway closed her bedroom door, simply out of habit.
It was late morning when she arose from bed. Silently she got up knowing that Thomas still had his hangover to sleep off. She put on her bathrobe and carefully opened and closed the door again. She walked down the now blank hallway thinking to herself “Good, now I can have new pictures here…” Making a pot of coffee she began to clear off the kitchen table. “Matt Sallas” she read the mailing address off of the unopened envelope out loud, and then tossed it in the trash. She felt liberated finally being able to clean off all of the clutter that had plagued her existence in that house. Once the table was cleaned she poured herself a cup of coffee and went to watch TV. News never really interested her. She loved to watch soap operas and infomercials. Knowing full well that these programmed were targeted at “Stay at home moms”. She smiled for the first time that day, she smiled knowing that she was no longer a stay at home mom. While changing the channels she happened across one of those TV shows like Jerry Springer where one person confronts another with a terrible secret. Usually these programs never phased her channel surfing, but today she paused. The topic was “Husbands that are having secret affairs”. At this she laughed, she laughed out loud. Today she watched the entire program knowing full well how it would end. It wouldn’t matte what the husband had done, or who he had done it with. In the end the wife confessed to sleeping with her husband’s best friend. The poor sap sat is amazement as his best friend came out and kissed his wife. He came on national television to ask for forgiveness and confess to his wife only to find out that his wife had done him one better and was leaving him. Sipping her coffee Mary smiled at this because she knew that the wife was the one who would hurt her husband in the end.
As the show ended Mary turned the TV off and sat in Matt’s… no, her lay-z-boy and relaxed. In the other end of the house she heard the sounds of a shower running, so she arose from her lay-z-boy and walked into the kitchen to begin making a breakfast. She stated simply with scrambled eggs, as she poured them over the hot skillet they sizzled and seared. Feeling almost festive she chopped up some peppers and onions and tossed them onto the skillet to make the eggs that much more special. Once the eggs were cooked she stared at them on the plate and realized that something was missing, hash browns. She took a potato from the pantry, noting that there were only two left in the bottom of the bag. She would need to get more the next time she went to the store. After cutting the potato in thin strips she made the hash browns she tossed them on the skillet just as she heard the shower turn off. She heard the footsteps plodding down the hallway coming to the kitchen and as she looked up waiting to see the excited look on Matt’s face when he realized she made a special breakfast for him. But she suddenly realized as Thomas turned the corner into the kitchen that Matt was not in the shower, it was Thomas that was in the shower.
“Hey, babe.” Thomas called to Mary across the kitchen. “Smells great, but I’ve got to go I’m already running late.” His hair was still wet as he stood in the kitchen. The light from the window streaked down across his face adding to Mary’s disillusionment. “I’ll stop by after work, bye”. And with that Thomas walked out the front door and speed away in his Mustang. She listened to the roar of the engine fade into the distance as her special breakfast got cold on the kitchen counter. She simply stood in the kitchen wondering what had come over her. She knew Matt was gone, but yet she had forgotten for a moment that he was gone. “What the hell was that!??”, she said out loud to her empty kitchen. For thirty minutes she was happy again, in her mind she was making breakfast for her two beautiful children and her loving husband. But in a split second she spiraled back down to reality where her loving husband and two loving children had left her not three hours before.
“Screw them”, Mary thought as she walked down the barren hallway. After taking a shower herself she began a cleaning frenzy. “Out with the old, In with the new”, she repeated to her self over and over. With Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon” blaring on the stereo she walked into Allison’s room. Most of her dolls must have been packed away in the pre-dawn hours when Matt woke the children up because they were going on a “vacation”. “God, the lies he must have told them to get out of the house…”, Mary sat on Allison’s bed looking around the room. It was a simple room, when they moved in Allison threw the biggest fit because she wanted “pink walls with little duckies on it”. So one day Matt went to the hardware store to buy pink paint and brushes and that very day Matt and Mary painted the entire room pink just for Allison. But that wasn’t good enough because it still needed “little duckies”, so Allison threw another fit and they promised to get her little duckies for her room. So the very next day Matt went to buy more paint and more brushes and hand painted little duckies for Allison. When the room was first finished it looked so happy and cheerful with the pink walls, a lacy bed spread, dolls, and stuffed animals. Now the room was barren. All that was left were Allison’s little duckies. Mary imagined how upset Allison would be if she knew that she would never get to see her duckies again. Sitting on the mattress in the pink room Mary realized how much she would miss her now departed daughter, her little Allison. But she was a hassle and annoyance. She would never want to get in the car when Mary was late for appointments. Allison could never tie her shoes and she seemed that she would never learn because mommy would always be there to tie them for her. Not any more. At this Mary smirked, Allison was just one less thing that she will have to put up with. Mary left little Allison’s room to get a trash bag, because Matt didn’t completely clean up after their hasty departure into the pre dawn haze. Mary started with the closet. Ballet slippers… trash. Ratty old dolls… garbage. Plastic princess jewelry… gone. After throwing out everything that reminded Mary of her daughter she turned to close the door to the room. As the door closed she realized that she forgot to remove something. She rushed out to the garage and grabbed a bucket of paint and a paintbrush. She rushed back into the room and in a fury covered the duckies with a forest green indoor-outdoor paint. “Screw it”, Mary thought, now this is just a room, a room needing a fresh coat of paint.
After getting a new trash bag Mary went farther down the hall to James’ room. James was easier to please when they had moved in two years ago. He just needed a toy box for is tanks and airplanes and a bed. To solve this problem Matt bought an old army foot locker and gave it to James to store his collection of GI Joe’s. But now the footlocker was gone and all that was left was the imprint of a box on the off white carpet. Mary tore down posters from Matt’s walls of airplanes that he had been given for birthdays and Christmases. Mary always hated those posters, glorifying machines. Maybe it was just the feminine side of her but she didn’t see how a piece of steel shaped into a rounded rectangle labeled Corvette could be considered beautiful by anyone. She pulled the thumbtacks out of the walls and threw them in the garbage bag too, not foreseeing any need for them in the future. Matt had been very thorough in helping the kids’ pack she imagined. It was his nature. If he were going to do something he would do it right or not do it at all. She was surprised to see one of James’ GI Joe’s under the bed. She reached down and held it aloft above the open garbage sack. His name was GI Charlie she remembered being told by James’. Somewhere within that stupid footlocker was GI Charlie’s rocket launcher because he was “too cool for a rifle.” She opened her hand and watched him fall into the bag with the torn up posters and the thumbtacks. “Finally”, she thought, “I’ll never have to pretend that I’m interested in these stupid GI Joe’s and their platoons, their side arms, and their missions.” She heaved the garbage bag over her shoulder and walked out to set the bag on the curb next to the bag of garbage from Allison’s room.
Wooooo, its been a while. Let me tell you what I been up to.
