Bluebell Books Short Story Slam -- Week 8

The Bluebell Books Short Story Slam!  Visit the home post here, and join in the fun!

This week the prompt was a photograph...  Darkish, perhaps, or perhaps that's just me projecting my darkish mind.  I was surprised how easy this story came, especially because I almost passed on participating this week -- I had no clue what to write.  Stream of consciousness may not be a bad thing after all ;)  I hope you enjoy!


Turning Back

The road back is the longest of them all.  It’s not a line; not even a circle.  It’s a meandering footpath, rocky and uphill most of the way, only downhill, mostly, when the slippery slope leads further away.  You don’t realize it, at first, when you begin slipping.  Perhaps you’re glad it’s not uphill, perhaps you feel you’re close.  But then you slide faster, you scrape your hands on muddy rocks, and you realize the darkness enveloping is — yes, it’s familiar, but it’s what you’re trying to get away from.  Your fingernails dig for purchase, dirt painfully gathering under them, but there’s no purchase, no stopping.  You just slide.


Why did you walk away?  Why did you need more, more than the sun, the clear sky?  More than the planes of fields that enclosed our world in their openness?  Why did you not feel the freedom of the wind, of the rippling prairie grass?  Did you look back, as you walked away?  I didn’t see you turn, but perhaps you did.

It took you years, didn’t it?  Years of running, of not turning back, before you even wanted to.  And I wonder, when you did turn, if what you saw there, what you felt, scared you into running faster.  I wonder, when the yearning began, if you pummeled it into silence out of hatred or out of fear for what that meant.

When the pulling started, when it kept you awake, when it made you absent to the fake world you’d built around yourself, did you fear it?  Or did you give in, in bits and pieces, perhaps indulging first in simple memories that couldn’t threaten in their careful little boxes?  Perhaps you remembered cookie trays coming out of the oven.  Perhaps you remembered a teddy bear, a stuffed giraffe.  You opened their little boxes carefully, daintily, not allowing them to spill.  Spilling is incontainable.  Spilling is messy.

But the boxes must have spilled; other memories must have come.  You stayed away from music; I know exactly which music you stayed away from.  But you can’t keep music away forever.  Music filters in, like the wind through cracks in even the tightest window.

So you come, then.  Down the winding path, down the slope that wasn’t slippery, finally, and your feet go faster in spite of yourself.  You don’t want to go fast, because all of a sudden you’re not sure anymore.  Is this it?  Nothing is the same, and everything is.  Everything is the same, but you’re not.  

You found your way back.  But…  Now you’re remembering, aren’t you, why the sun wasn’t enough, why the clear sky couldn’t hold you, why the open fields enclosing felt so tight.  And now it begins again, the walking.  But now, after here, you have nowhere to go back to.

There is no coming home.