The Park

Flash Fiction

Every once in a while (maybe once a week?!) I’ll post a flash fiction piece. In the broad sense, flash fiction is under 1,000 words and can work as its own story or scene. It can be theoretically part of a larger story, as in the reader can see the potential for the story around what the flash fiction is, but what you get is the shorter piece.

Here is my first installment: The Park

“Maybe that could have been us,” he said with great distance in his tone.
Following his gaze to the little boy riding the red tricycle, flanked by smiling parents, she shrugged. “If we were two different people, I suppose.”
“Or at a different time…”
She broke her gaze from the family, tilting her head towards him. “Time was never the problem though…”
He shook his head. “I guess not. Would that have made you happier, you think?”
“A baby?”
A nod.
Suddenly, the park seemed to shrink to the size of a thimble, cramming every coulda, woulda, shoulda in with them.
“Me?”
His face fell as he broke the long stare. “Us.”
“Impossible to say. Would it have made you happier?”
“Me?” he said, now looking long past the child and his parents.
“Us,” she relented.
Fifteen years locked eyes with her once more. “I…I don’t…”
“Yeah,” she said in the airiness of her exhale.
He would have plastered joy on his face at a positive pregnancy test, she was sure. He would have checked out ten books from the library, drawn up plans for a nursery, and signed them up for birthing classes. She could almost feel his hand around hers as she thought of laboring their theoretical baby into the world, wiping her head with a towel as she sweat and cried.
But they both knew that’s where it would end. He had to know it, anyway, she hoped. He was all planinng and no execution. Dreams that never quite made their way into reality. It was a great fortune that when they met neither of them had wanted children, and that it had stayed that way for both of them this whole time. No one had a change of heart. That was never the problem.

There hadn’t been any problems until the last year or two, he thought, watching her watch the breeze through the trees. It felt like all of a sudden that she started looking at him differently. Distantly. He’d thought it was because she’d had changed her mind about having a family, now wanting one. He was wrong, though. Bringing that up led to a full forty-eight hour fight, him being accused of going for low-hanging fruit and not paying attention to a damn thing.
She was right. It was low-hanging and, frankly, imaginary fruit. She wasn’t the only one who’d slipped away from their connection. He’d intentionally taken on extra projects at work, letting the job eat away hours with her. Sure, she’d done the same thing, he knew, but he never asked about it. Just as she hadn’t.

By the time she’d accused him of an affair, she’d known it was over. She’d had no real reason to suspect it aside from his longer hours at work, of which she was also guilty and he’d said nothing. That was really why she’d brought it up. It was too easy of a shot and didn’t require a bit of calculation. How boring—a man having an affair? Please. That wasn’t him. It wasn’t them.
Pulling her eyes down from the tree line she watched him some more. Tried to find the young man of twenty he’d been when they first met, maybe somewhere in his eyes. She didn’t want a twenty-year-old any more than she wanted to be twenty again. But youthful optimism was a hell of a drug, and she longed for a hit.
“It’s not about a baby,” she said, depressurizing them out of the thimble. “There’s just a…I don’t know… an obscure kind of…sorrow.”
He was quiet for a moment before turning his face toward her with curiosity. “An obscure kind of sorrow.”
She nodded.
“Where’d you hear that?”
A shrug. “Nowhere. I don’t know. It’s just…what it is, right? This thing we can feel but can’t really, like, get a grasp on.”
“Hm.” He made the thoughtful noise through his nose, not fully committing to it.

“Sorrow,” he repeated, trying to taste the word. “What does sorrow mean?”
Her brow furrowed. “What, like a definition?”
He nodded.
She tapped on her phone. “A feeling of deep distress caused by loss, disappointment, or misfortune...”
“What are the synonyms?” He leaned closer to read along.
A deep breath later a smattering of words punctuated her screen.
She read aloud, “Agony, misery, pain, anguish…”
“Lamenting, affliction, woe,” he continued.
“Woe,” she repeated, her mouth turning up as she chuckled just inside her chest. “That’s dramatic.”
“Dolor,” he said with a hint of excitement, raising his eyebrows. “How about that one?”

“Not so obscure, I guess,” she said, sliding her phone back in the pocket of the fleece that had once been his.
“No,” he agreed. “But you weren’t saying the word was obscure, but that you were experiencing it in an obscure, out of full view way, right?”
“Right.” She stood, brushing the back of her pants. “Ready?”
Planting his hands on his knees with a deep breath, he rose to his full height, half a head taller than her. “Ready.”
They strolled toward the sunset at the edge of the park, turning right at the gate. It was only three blocks to home, and a block in he reached for her hand. She eyed it for two paces, then looked up at him. He gave a little shrug, pushing his hand forward another inch in the space between them. She shrugged back, offering a half grin—a half-hearted grin—before looking back at the littered sidewalk and letting her hand fall into his.
“Want to order Thai take out?” he asked once they reached their building.
“Sure, sounds good.”
“But from the place on fifth. The one on Main doesn’t have—”
“The right spring rolls,” she interrupted, holding the door open.
“Right. Thanks,” he said, walking through the door.
She stood there for the fullness of a moment, feeling a kind of obscure sorrow when he had to drop his hand to do so.'

Until next time,

andrea