The Story Garden 5.0
Flash Fiction
Bridges
My sister is asleep on the other side of the double bed we share. She is thirteen, a year older than me, and she nearly always falls asleep before I do. The early fall chill drifts in through the window screen and settles over the bed. The dampness in the air weighs the top sheet down on my legs, so that no matter how I turn they will not relax.
The sound of a woman's laughter breaks the quiet that hangs over the sugar cane field. Across the field from the house is a tavern. It sits back off the road down near the creek.
Behind the tavern a narrow rope bridge spans a creek that runs by our house. Once I imagined two lovers lying on that bridge in the moonlight, their movements making the bridge sway gently back and forth. The memory of it clings now so sharply in my mind, that I wonder if it was imagined, or if I really saw them there, his dark head bent over her body, her skin reflecting moonlight the way the ripples on the water did.
Tonight I sense the loneliness of my mother as she waits. I have never once heard her say to my father, "I'm lonely. Will you stay home with me tonight?" But I have felt her thinking it.
He left in the afternoon sunlight, his hat tipped rakishly on his wavy auburn hair, his promise familiar, "I'm just goin' into town on business. I'll be back before dark."
My mother stood in the doorway and watched him walk up the dirt path toward the gravel road. I stood in her shadow and watched, too. Sometimes we learn deep and powerful secrets in an instant - secrets that are there for us, constant and abiding, long before our hearts suddenly know.
Watching my father walk away this afternoon, I knew this secret - the same things that hurt us through the night can be borne with more grace in the sunlight of day. We sense things more keenly at night.
The night is quiet. I listen only to the steady sound of the rocker on the paint-faded wood porch.
--Patsy Covington
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