Flash Fiction Attempt

You loved me once.

I know that now as I knew it then - that night by the lead paned windows as you took me in your arms. Bathed in moonlight your skin was washed grey, marked in deep red from the kisses I laid on your neck. You whispered hurried pleas into my ear and I felt the beating of your heart as though it were my own and in that moment, I knew – it was no cheap thrill.

It was love.

That is why I stayed.

I can’t remember the day you left. Not fully. Glimpses of feelings and images flutter past me like autumn leaves, swept up in a great wind. They elude me, but I see their colour and shape as they rise and fall – a candle burning on the mantle – a broken wineglass in the hall – warm red blood on cold grey stone.

I see your eyes, deep with sorrow and with passion and I feel the love you had for me then. It haunts me, faded like an echoing scream that has slowly diminished to a whisper.

But still I stayed here, long after that scream grew soft.

In your absence this house continued its lonely existence - barely clinging to life as its inhabitants were swallowed by the shadow of that night.

Your daughter grew, fuelled by anger and by betrayal while her mother faded – her heart broken and drained. Her hair turned grey and fragile as her daughter’s bloomed, red and wild. These women were changed and twisted and forever altered by your existence - by your love and your guidance - by your evils and your failings.

This house, filled with the still fading echoes of pleasures and pains you inflicted became a tomb for the women you had loved.

And yet we stayed.

Years passed and your wife fell deeper. Old before her time she struggled with her love for you even as she took others to her bed. She searched these strangers for something she thought lost, something she thought she might one day reclaim - something she never did.

Shuffling through these halls with heavy bones, she tried her best to give her daughter the things she deserved – to somehow pay the price for your failings. The knots in her back from the labours she endured ground her into an early grave as your daughter grew to pity her.

She buried her mother in a grey silk dress – a single red rose in her hands.

The howling cries of a grieving child filled these halls as a fire enveloped her - a fire of hatred for you and your sins and of hatred for her mother’s love and weakness and of hatred for this house and the ghosts it still holds.

But still she stayed.

19 years and now you return. The time you served carved in lines across your face - a map of regret for the life you have lost. I watch from my place in shadow as you two – the disgraced father and his bitter daughter fight your battles and cry your tears of regret.

You cry for each other - for your wife and mother. For the family you lost and the life you might have had. For the memories sullied and those that will now never come to pass.

But you do not cry for me.

Not a word is spoken about that night. About the passion and the pleasure and the love we shared.

No one speaks of the day you left - of blood on grey stone and the broken glass in the hall. Those words are now ghosts that linger like smoke but are never given form - a secret that haunts more than this house.

Yes. This house is haunted.

But not by me - by you.

By the pain you caused when you broke your vow. By the void you left when you spilt my blood and took my life. By the ghost of your love that echoed in the heart of your wife – your daughter – your mistress. It is haunted not by the women you destroyed but by the scars you left within and without them.

I serve no purpose here. No one here will ever cry for me as they have for you. No one here will scream for my blood as they have yours. No one here will mourn me as they have mourned you.

My presence here will not be felt. The marks I had once made have long since faded.

But you loved me once.

And so I stay - my cold heart haunted by the ghost of your love.

EDIT: I forgot to mention that this story was inspired by the Suzanne Vega song "Song in Red and Gray". The title and subject matter [The portrait of a family as told from the point of view of a mistress] was something I found really interesting and I kinda just wanted to explore that and bring a supernatural twist to it. :)

I also wanted to explore something I have noticed in the older generations of my own family... that the lives of women - even strong willed, fiercely independent women can so easily be defined by and even completely revolve around one man.