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.