Grey

Background story on Lady Dark Side

When she got to her apartment, the girl went to flick the light switch like the hundreds of times she had before, but she stopped herself. There were dangling electrical wires where the ceiling light once was and her jar of coins hadn’t collected enough that day to pay for a new one. The girl shrugged and flicked the light switch on anyways. She picked up the mail in front of the door and rifled through it, discarding everything except for a letter sent from her mom. The girl laid her things on the ground and produced a cloud of brown dust as she flopped on her greyed floor mattress. She turned on the lamp next to her bed and closed her eyes for a long moment before she took out two pages from the letter. She cringed at the hand-written opening line of the first paper, “To my only daughter”.

“As always, I send this to check up on you and to recount how life has been on our humble homestead. The weather has been much more agreeable for the last few weeks, so I have been going out to the parks more and more with your father-”

The girl stopped reading the letter and stared up at the ceiling. The room was partially filled with the orange-yellow glow of the lamp. The moonlit flooded in threw the large window on the other side of the room. The girl continued.

“-and take in the sights. Oh how lovely nature has been of late. Your father and I find ourselves walking down paths in the parks where the trees are sparse and yet the wild life is plentiful. Squirrels will chase each other up and down trees while a raven or two flies overhead. Sometimes, it helps me appreciate the simpler things in life. It’s a nice escape from worrying about your father’s illness and a reminding that nature can come in nicer forms. Our servant is always within arm’s reach of your father. She is a very kind and plain girl and just about your age. I am sure you two would get along very well and I dare say that she could teach you a thing or two. She accompanies our walks and I often find myself talking to her about your father’s condition. She has been quite a darling, asking me how I’ve been taking the whole situation. I find myself sharing much about my personal thoughts and feelings and she serves a very good listener to my fretful ramblings. I-“

The girl struggled to read the last few sentences of the letter but failed to read the gibberish scrawled on the page. The girl sighed before sitting up and hugging her knees together tightly while her head rest on top of them. She rocked back and forth for a while before she threw aside the first and second paper. She laid back down on the raggedy mattress and stared at the ceiling.

The girl imagined herself with her mother sitting in the bench in some park. In front of them stood a blue pond, filled with white swans. She wondered how she would say it to her mom. Would she say it casually while watching the swans swim around aimlessly? Would she turn and look into her mother’s eyes while she said it? Would she look down at the grass blades by her feet and take moment before she said it? Or would she look at the sky? Would it matter? The last question caught the girl off-guard and she reach over to grab the second page from the letter.

The page detailed everything that the girl already knew about her mother. The institution housing her. The symptoms that she has shown over the last few months, The various treatments and actions that have been taken. 

The girl took her time reading and rereading the letter. The letter took up a couple of double-sided pages, filled with small text that was interspersed with phrases like “Your father and I would really like it if…” and “We don’t understand why…”, and whenever the girl read one of those lines, she couldn’t help but laugh a bit to herself. She took out a container of white-out and eliminated those lines from the letter, and after rereading through the edit document, the girl smiled. The girl stood up and went to her wall of letters and added the new, edited letter to the end of the collection. She stood back and looked at the couple dozen letters nailed to the wall. She went back to her bed and took out some paper to write a letter back. There was one big window in the girl’s apartment and the rays from the sun turned into light from the moon as the girl continued to write. She looked out the window from her bed on the floor and took her letter with her as she walked to the window. She pressed the empty side of the letter against a dusty, grey window pane and turned it around to write the letters ending sentence, “Things are better this way.”

Author's Note

I need to incorporate this into the larger story better.