Here’s a piece of flash fiction from Bailey Casper Stalcup:
Moonlight puddles into the concaves of the countryside, its reflection pursuing the flow of creeks,rolling over a fast expanse of silence. A young man walks beside his bicycle, retreating home after a long day’s work apprenticing at Dr. Ferris’ practice. Sam can only hope for the best in a few months time – the best for a farmer’s son with little to his name. Passing by the Addison’s, the Howard’s, then the Barnes’, he is only half a mile away from his own place. However, he notices a candle lit in the window of the Beckner home. Pausing, he spies a curtain of red hair paired with the white and lacey one. He doesn’t need to see her pretty face to know who she is. One part of his mind considers picking up a stone, while another remembers the three dogs that guard her home. So with a sigh, Sam continues on his way.
The letter is crumbled in her fist, but Carolyn remember the message well. Her country has joined the war, and she will join the Red Cross. She can only pray Sam has an empty mailbox when he comes home.
~•~
The sound of bombs and gunfire seem to never end. Even when they do cease, the echoes still ring like an ambient music to the memories of her mind. Carolyn struts rather than sprints like she should through the rows upon rows of beds, each of them bearing bloody bodies – living or dead. She has a vague idea of where she is supposed to be. All she knows is she is tired of tending to the dying. Maybe her heels will kill her too. Her appearance should not matter. Why would the boys like to see her red lips after seeing enough of the color on their comrade’s own only a mile away?
He knows he’s dying. He knows it more than he has ever known anything before. He’s sorry he could not say goodbye to Pop, Will, Sarah, and even old Ferris. He wishes he could live for Mama, but most of all, he wishes he could go back to the day he almost threw a stone at Carolyn Beckner’s window.
~•~
She sees him and knows in that instant she is powerless. Instead of putting a hand over her bloody mouth like she wishes to, she places it in his own.
He knows it’s her. He doesn’t have to look for bloody hair. He intertwines his fingers between her own.
A tear drops like moonlight into a creek. A candle fades on a windowsill, somewhere in the countryside.
Only in her greatest moment of grief for some farmer’s boy from a land of flowing creeks and vast expenses, was Carolyn Beckner allows to remember what silence sounds like.