The SECRET KEEPER has issued our next writing challenge. Our buzz words for the week are:SENSE | SECURE | WALK | TIME | ALONE |
This week I am choosing to put out a flash fiction piece.
The Cliff Walk
By JE Lillie
She has been gone seven years. Still I often come to this place alone to walk along the craggy shore line. I can sense her in the salty wind that whispers through the air with all the poignancy of a lost love, taste her briny kiss across time like some backhanded rejection. It hurts like the shutting of the casket, but I long for it if only to keep her memory alive.
This place, our place, where we first held hands. I remember her smooth fingers slipping against my calloused palm as I helped her over the sea-smoothed rocks to the ocean’s edge so she could wade in the surf. I can still see her holding the legs of her jeans up, trying and failing to keep the ocean from anointing her with the holy water of reminiscence. She laughed. I laughed in those days before, when the Cliff Walk along the ocean’s edge was not a knife to the heart. Still, a knife to the heart is better than feeling nothing and so I have chosen to return year after year to conjure, if only through tears, the time forever lost.
This time is different.
I climb to the pine-encrusted knoll where we last stood together. I think of that day. Her thin frame was already a ghost held together by bones and tumors, almost gone but not quite. She held my hand like always that day.
“Find someone new.” She whispered.
“Stop.” I said.
We both cried. Her head scarf was lost in the breeze as we kissed for what was to be the final time.
Wiping away a tear I remove the urn from its satchel. I tilt it ever so slightly and let the wind take her ashes.
“Good bye.” I say again, but this time I mean it.
A gentle hand caresses my back. I feel her lips touch my shoulder. As she puts her arm through mine I can see, in the moonlight, she is weeping with me, grieving alongside me. I am secure in the knowledge, my wife would have liked her.
Lillie-Put 
Beautifully written.
Thank you!
Oh, Pastor J, you have no idea but you just wrote my brother Michael’s wife’s life(after waiting 10 yrs it was time) as she spread his ashes up at Nubble Light two months before her marriage to her new husband. My heart has been deeply, deeply touched by your beautiful, heartfelt story! I can’t even express in words how your story has effected me, you are such a talented writer!!!
Thank you Deb. It is every writer’s goal to connect to their readers on a deep emotional level. It is hard to write stories like this because they spark such deep emotion in me.
Such a beautiful portrayal of the grief process for the beloved. So hard to let go finally. 🙂
Thank you.
How beautiful your sentiment. I can feel every word and know what you are creating for the reader to feel. ‘I am secure in the knowledge my wife would have liked her.’ The line was a surprise but after thinking about it, I knew what it meant to me. You do so much want the person you lost to accept the new love in your life. How poignantly you conveyed this in your story. You are a good story teller. What you wrote was heavy with comforting feelings. – jk
Thank you. As I considered the story I could feel the grief my character carried.
Losing someone you love so intensely carries with such a deep pain never forgotten. It may nelt away into memory but it is always with you. Your character lost that person and now had found someone who he feels his lost love will accept. I think in most cases, the one who is gone does accept and want you to continue on and to find someone to love. The spirit world is a more generous group. You really moved me with your writing.
Thanks so much.