Bereft of Leaves

Photo courtesy of Dawn M. Miller

Indira was mesmerized by the leaves. Perhaps more taken by them than with Michael, her coffee date.

The Silence

I awoke feeling surprisingly well-rested. Heading to the kitchen, I smiled for the first time since the hellish ordeal with Max started. I had won. The kids were mine.

But the items on the table stopped me short. They were in Max’s habitual morning arrangement. Then, I noticed the silence.

The End of a Marriage (Sunday Photo Fiction)

She watched him fill the bird feeder, wanting to tell him not to bother. What was his name again? Bob? Bill? Tom? Tom. Yes, that seemed familiar. But it didn’t matter–he’d never understand her even if she was able to get the words out. And the effort was just too much.

A Change of View (Sunday Photo Fiction)

Pedro and I crept closer. The boat was the most beautiful thing we’d ever seen. It was like something out of the magical stories our Abuela loved to tell us, making us long for something more than our small house with its two rooms and dirt floors and view that never changed.

The Umbrella

Jane hugged the umbrella to her, like a teddy bear, then extended it straight out like a sword. She had always been a happy child, never missing something she’d never had. The operation, finally safe to do at age 7, had been a success–She could finally see. Things she had known by sound and touch and, sometimes, taste, she now learned anew by sight. Looking around her recovery room at first, her eyes had lit upon my face and then my open umbrella, thrown haphazardly under the only chair in the room.

“What’s that, Mama?”

That January Day (Sunday Photo Fiction)

Julian Pratt had caught the third train of the morning, not wanting the press of the first two, which were express to London and full to the doors with the assorted grim-faced men and women who worked these days in the City, moving real and virtual money from here to there and back again.

Julian was in no rush this morning. As a pensioner, he was in no rush most mornings. In fact, it had been nearly two decades since he’d had to rush anywhere.

FFfAW #21: Seventy Years Gone

Photo thanks to Vanessa Rodriguez

Flash Fiction for Aspiring Writers #21

I’m experimenting with Deep 1st POV this week. Please let me know if it works! I used some lines from “In Flanders Fields” by John McCrae – a great WWI poem. I’m a bit over the 175-word limit this week. Sorry about that!

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In Flanders fields the poppies blow, between the crosses…whose to know?

“Grandpa, this way.”

“Dad, are you okay?

Not the Time, but the Place (Sunday Photo Fiction)

Time is irrelevant; place is everything.

That had been the first, and most important, lesson my father had taught me. “Wanderers, or what other people call spirits, transcend time. Instead, they haunt a place–a specific location–even if it changes as the years go forward. Or backward.”

FFfAW #20: Gone

This week’s Flash Fiction for Aspiring Writers: Photo prompt with story to be 100-175 words.

I’d always imagined the End of Days as bleaker, blacker, somewhat more desolate. Well, okay, I’ve never really imagined the End at all. But in the movies, it was not nearly this serene. So maybe they’d got it wrong. Or have I?

Bereft

Written for a creative writing prompt on Earliest Childhood Memory:

Inseparable as twins,

now I stand pressed;

the screen door is not

the only thing between us.