Worthing Flash

War   We are going to Grandma's place for the weekend. The children and the dog are very excited. She lives in a quaint little house in the countryside. The children look forward to the walks in the Countryside, the lush green fields, the mushroom hunting, the barbecue and of course, freshly baked bread. Grandma greets them at the porch and the smell of the bread in the oven wafts through the air. The kids take turns to feed the chickens and grandma tells them stories of the good old days.   And then came the war.

If ever the train does not pass over the bridge in the night he cannot sleep. Under the bridge the river slides green and slow, past the implacable mountains, the old town and the new warehouses, past the willow trees and the fishermen on the banks. There was once another bridge over this river but that was years ago and it pains his heart to remember it. He stood with his wife on that bridge the day of their silver wedding anniversary and he presented her with a pair of filigree earrings and she smiled as wide and tall as its stone arch. It grieves him to think of his wife because she too is gone like the old bridge. Instead, he concentrates on the rumble of the freight train, the solidness of it, not the ghost of his wife and the days of pounding sorrow, or the way the bridge crumpled under the weight of explosions, his wife collapsed in his arms. There are two ducks on the river, a mallard and a hen. He watches as they follow each other through the eddies, as the sound of the ...

The Excited Courage I Needed Dad was very protective of me as I grew up. I saw his safety rules as signs of a mean Dad. Everyone was riding a bike. Except me. We lived at the end of a short driveway which veered off from a 300-foot lane. The neighbour children flew down this lane with their bicycles, and I could only watch them enviously and wistfully, not partaking, forbidden from riding a bicycle. Often, in the midst of those long summers, I sat at the edge of our yard watching them ride. They loved the attention my close observation gave them, and they pedalled fast and furious past me, knowing they were the object of my envy. The winter I was eleven, five years after my sister died, my father surprised me with a bike. It was no ordinary bike that he had purchased it at a used bicycle shop and had hidden in a shed out back. Carefully, with his artist’s hand, he painted it light blue with white trim. He had even painted the handlebars and wheels with silver paint. I like to ha...

Today is the seventh anniversary of #worthingflash. It now has over 100 writers and 84,000 readers. The following story was published in Entropy Squared and is available in their print edition. Queenie was a friend of mine. I went to visit one weekend. Her husband was there but I didn’t get to see him much because he was “busy working on the boat.” He was working in the garden. I went out to say hello but he was silent and went on with the work. We had a meal, just the two of us. Queenie was used to dining alone. When we heard that the boat had sunk on its first voyage, there was a certain amount of hilarity. He had escaped with his life. The devil looks after his own. From Guest Contributor Derek McMillan Derek is the writer of “Murder from Beyond the Grave” available on eBay.