Tag: Flash Fiction

by Vivian Heather

“Maybe this will help.” She offers me a small bound book with one hand and pours hot water from the kettle into the teapot with the other.

The brown leather cover is embossed with gold lettering in the top left corner.

I squeak with anticipation.

Collins Paragon Diary No. 181

A quick glance at the inner leaf reveals my mother’s beautiful script in what must be fountain pen. The elegant curls of her full name followed by Invermere B.C., on the opposite leaf in blue ballpoint is noted 1941-1942. Quick mental math lets me know it holds a peek at age 16, in her own words.

”I doubt there’s much there, “ she says.

A practiced mother of three she won’t offer up the jugular lightly. She fills our mugs with tea.

I wrench it open at no particular page and read aloud the adolescent observations of my seemingly shy mother.

“Gee Bud is swell, I hope he comes over and listens to the radio again tonight!”

THE COLLINS PARAGON DIARY NO. 181

I’ve never in all the long years of tea-stained afternoons heard of this boy. While I howl with laughter, my hand clapping the table hard enough to slop tea from my mug, my mother says, “I don’t recall liking him that much.” 

“Well he gets three exclamation points on Saturday the 17th of May.” I snort and continue mining for gold.

“Perhaps I’ve made a mistake…” her words linger between us.

She makes no effort to claw back the tiny compendium of angst. I imagine her wrestling me for it and know who would lose.

At seventy-five the woman still has the reflexes of a mongoose. I simmer down and start to read from the beginning. This is the year her first love grows up, joins up, and comes back to town a Casanova. It is a year of measles, death, heartbreak and LEARNING TO DRIVE A CAR!? (Something she never did in my lifetime). We drink tea and I wonder at her absolute trust in me.

“How do you like the name Jane?” I ask. Like her it is practical and unadorned. Perfect for fictionalizing the early ups and downs of her life.

“That should do nicely.” 

by Vivian Heather

How mighty she was. He pushed back a lock of silvery hair from her face. Eyes closed, with a voice like autumn leaves she said, “Tell me it’s not time. I don’t want you to go.”

“Harvest is in, fish and meat hang in the smokehouse and there is plenty of wood for the stove.” It was a game they played. Snow scented air had been tickling his nose and making his back itch for a fortnight but still he remained. Pushing back the Fall ever so slightly.

Under the bedcovers she nestled like a child into his dark musky chest.

“I would stay like this forever.”

Hmm, he hummed a tune that swelled in his core. He recalled the first time he had seen her in the glade. A cape of black hair hung to her waist as she dug at the wild onions along the creek. A face gaunt from winters toll yet firm with resolve. He had been drawn in by her strength. Made whole by her grace. He came to her that first spring a young man, appealing to the eye, light in spirit and robust in all tasks. And knowing no better remained so regardless of the passage of time.

Decades passed. Pine buds, tender and vivid, signalled his decent from the mountain. He would burst forth from the edge of the forest with a song on his lips, for he knew many. It seemed that winter drew the music from people, bright hope against a frozen bite. From the darkness he would pluck verse and melodies stretching and teasing them into his own. First snows that caressed the glade swept him away.

She, tucked up in her cabin with just the dogs for company, he loping into the dark. Appearing to grow taller at every stride, a trail of rough garments leading to the foot of the mountain.

There had been children over the years. Some grown to adulthood had left the glade questing for their own homes. A few they had returned to the earth’s care in a small garden of sorrow. As delightful as their offspring were, for him there was only her. The turn of her head and beauty of her smile at his arrival and the scent of her longing at separation.

His body shuddered at the knowledge that this would be her last Autumn in the glade. A sweet loamy essence clung to her. Skin bone white and thin as papery birch.

It was time.

His voice thick as molasses, stuck time in place with the notes.

She ran awkwardly at first, sustained purely by his firm grip on her hand. Soon she led him, pulling hard for the tree line, laughter rang through the glade as snow and  their garments fell.

The End.