If you're interested

This weeks Fiction Friday theme; Have your character give thirteen reasons why they should learn a new language. This is my take...a mother's monologue.


Kyle bounced and bundled around the room with the kind of unbridled and infectious excitement that only a five year old can muster...especially when he's ready, willing and very impatient to fly off on the holiday of a lifetime.

"The taxi's here mummy...and I'm all ready to go...are you nearly finished?" His sweet, but shrill voice resonated throughout the tiled ground floor before drifting up the stairs to where I was checking drawers, cupboards and the most unlikley nooks and crannies in search of that damned Italian phrasebook.

I definitely had one...Mark had bought it for me on our honeymoon in Rome...didn't have much need for it really, we rarely left the hotel as I recall. Three years later and Kyle was born...shorthly after that, Mark and I split, or rather he left me...left us both as it turned out.
I put the book away with all the other crap he'd given me...I knew it was somewhere in the spare room and probably still in pristine condition because I'd never so much as flicked through the pages since the day he bought it...reminded me too much of him and his Latin good looks.

I had always wanted to learn Italian...not just because my maternal grandfather had hailed from Genoa...but also because it seemed such an expressive, emotional language conjuring up sensual images in my head of romance and warm sultry nights...good food and sweet Red Wine...and of course those sexy Italian men. Sadly, I never got around to it...not even one lesson. I suppose I was just plain lazy...we didn't have to speak any other language really...didn't everyone speak English anyhow and if they couldn't...well, that was their problem.

I heard the cab driver honking impatiently outside the house...I looked at my watch.

" Dammit...!" I cursed quietly. The phrase book would have to stay behind. 

We had to load up and get moving...it was normally only forty five minutes to the airport but in mid-day traffic you could add another thirty to that...but the journey just flew by. I was never happier than when I was with Kyle...he lit up my life. I swear at times I could just stare in to his dark eyes and time seemed to stand still...he entranced me...my beautiful son.  He had the most striking bone structure, from me of course...and gorgeous sparkling eyes, full of mischief...too much like his father's. Kyle was a looker, that was for sure. I used to dream of the man he would become...tall, strong and handsome...he was my Prince and I was so very proud of him.

Two hours later and we were sitting on the plane...Kyle's nose pressed against the window, his little face aglow with wonderment at the cotton wool cloud blanket just beneath us. Everything was so new to him...so fresh...so much for him to see and do in his life.

I swore I'd always be there for him, even if his father wasn't.

It was raining in Milan...seemed to me just like another typical summer storm...the air was warm and humid. We picked up the hire car and I decided to head down to Genoa right away despite the storm and the gathering gloom. I was a confident driver and it was only a hundred miles or so of good quality roads to the city, so I guessed my lack of the language wouldn't be too much of a hinderance.

An hour later and we'd only travelled thirty miles...the black sky was illuminated randomly by lightning strikes and the rain was battering down so hard that the wipers could barely keep up...I was beginning to wish we'd stayed in Milan. Kyle was asleep in the back and I could easilly have climbed in there with him...I should have stopped then.

Three times the signs had lit up as we passed them on the freeway...warning of flash floods apparently...I didn't recognise any of the words so it meant nothing to me. I was too busy just struggling to drive through the storm and paid little attention...the night was dark and murky and I guess I was too tired.
I found out later that the local radio stations had been broadcasting throughout the night...warning motorists not to drive unless it was absolutely necessary. Oh, yeah...I heard the reports on the car radio just fine...it may as well have been Martians talking to me...I just tuned to a music station to help stay awake.

Even if I could have understood them, I didn't even see the 'Road Closed' signs as I sped towards the bend. I rounded the curve too fast and we hit it almost immediately. The river had burst through the bank and was flowing in a torrent across the carriageway...we began to slide. After that...everything is just a blur, brakes screeching, engine racing, the car skidding and turning...and Kyle screaming.

A sudden thudding impact...and then the silence...just horrible, eerie, deafening silence.

My life ended that day...or might as well have done because my Kyle was gone at five years old...a life ended before it had begun and it was all my fault...mine...his mother. On this earth I had just one task...to protect him but I let him down.  I've regretted that day every waking moment since...more than four thousand days and nights of torment...a hundred and fifty months of pain and lonliness. Why him? Why not me?

Thirteen years ago today my beautiful son was taken from me...thirteen years of torture...thirteen years of pain...thirteen years of guilt-ridden dreamless sleep..

And thirteen reasons why I wish I'd learned Italian.

The End


 

 

This weeks Fiction Friday Theme : Tell about your character's feelings towards animals and why she feels that way. 
I immediately thought of Amelia..May she Rest In Peace.


Amelia stared at the Tiger Prawns that lay there silently and accusingly at the edge of her plate kicking their legs periodically as if trying, even now, to escape their destiny. Of course they could not since each had been pierced neatly through the abdomen on long thin wooden skewers by Mr Tan. 

She drooled as she picked a prawn randomly from the pile. The marbled blue back of the crustacean wriggled, legs frantically pumping as it made one final and futile effort to flee. 

She smiled and dropped it into the steaming pot. 

Chinese Steamboat was one of Amelia's favourite dishes...the mere act of dipping live creatures into the boiling broth before tasting their searing hot flesh a matter of minutes after their lives had ended both thrilled and seduced Amelia, satisfying her basest desires at many levels.
She salivated in anticipation of the succulent and subtle flavours of the Tiger Prawn which had so recently and gallantly sacrificed its life for her pleasure, before dipping it in Mr Tan's sweet Chilli sauce and popping it into her dainty mouth. That is how it was for Amelia...she loved animals. In fact, she adored them all...fried, boiled, stewed or roasted..even raw. 

Yes, Amelia was truly passionate about animals. 

She had made it her life's work this last twenty years or so to eat her way around the globe, gorging herself on on the mutilated remains of  mammals, insects, crustaceans and reptiles..essential ingredients in any number of  gastronomically delightful regional dishes... and then writing about her pleasure in doing so in a series of best-selling extreme lifestyle cookery books. 

Amelia firmly believed that all animals were either predator or prey and since man was, she argued, at the top of the food chain, it was only right and proper for him to want to eat the lower orders. It was our natural birthright to do so and she considered it her duty to push the boundaries of culinary exploration on behalf of her fellow man. Over the years Amelia had consumed in pursuit of this maxim, a stomach-churning array of barely digestible animal offerings laid out on platters from the teeming cities of Asia to the sweltering jungles of South America. 
A book critic had once dubbed Amelia, the Indiana Jones of food..she liked that accolade and it kind of explains what she was doing here alone in a Western Australian wasteland, on this early spring evening sitting at a roaring campfire by the water's edge jotting down notes in her diary for her latest  book. 

It was dusk...the light was fading and as she scribbled, Amelia  savoured the mouth-wateringly meaty aroma of the small Dingo Dog's carcass which she herself had caught and gutted and which was now slowly spit-roasting over the open fire...almost ready for her to eat. 

Amelia had her back turned to the estuary and so probably didn't even see the five metre Salty as it leapt at her from the water amid a flurry of mud and cracking  branches before snapping its powerful jaws around her waist and dragging her back into the murky water. The crocodile rolled violently under water, tearing off and consuming great chunks of Amelia's pale flesh while as if from nowhere, several others joined the melee..feasting in the churning blood-stained water. After a while, the commotion died down, the water was once more calm and Amelia was gone. 

It was appropriate, and not a little ironic that Amelia should meet her end in such dramatic fashion...passing through the digestive system of a beast older than time itself and a tad higher up the food chain than she had been was a fitting way to go...after all...Amelia really, really loved animals. 

 
This weeks Fiction Friday theme: Start with a fire.

FIRE!

Did  the Captain enjoy barking the order....certainly his eyes were fixed on mine, his thin lips curled into a sneering smile as he stood ram-rod straight, his tall figure a silhouette against the grey dawn of a Flanders sky.

I saw a dozen rifle barrels not fifteen paces distant...pointing directly at me...and beyond the weapons twelve faces, each one well known to me and every one proud to call me friend. Their faces were etched with fear as with trembling arms they sighted their weapons upon my bound and tethered torso.  Reacting like automatons to the Captain's orders, they cocked their weapons. Young men just like me, not one of them past his twentieth birthday and trained merely to obey without question, ready to fire on his command at the target pinned roughly onto my winter greatcoat more or less over the spot where my young heart was now pounding...racing towards its final moments of pulsing, vital life. 

We had all been happy to march to war back then, a lifetime ago, I was eighteen years old and proud to serve, yes even willing to die for King and Country...but not like this, not like vermin...not in shame at the hands of my comrades.  We were sleeping when the bombardment began...same as ever..mustard gas, munitions and low level machine gun bullets straffing across no-mans land. The shell landed in the trench and all hell broke loose...dead...all of them...blown to pieces before my eyes. I was covered head to foot in their blood..it was hot and sticky.  I screamed... ran...far away from it, into the night...that was the last thing I remember...and then the  Court Martial..Dereliction of duty...Desertion.  

"An open and shut case" he said, "Death by Firing Squad."  Sobbing, I collapsed on the floor, no longer a soldier, just a dead man walking, destined to die a coward...buried alone in a foreign land in an unmarked grave. 

As my friends fired, I saw their rifles recoil, each barrel flashing in the half-light of the misty morning and then nothing as I felt the burning lead tear through my flesh, shredding organs and spewing my essence into the mud to mix with the blood of countless other scared young men in this damn war.

May God forgive us all. 


Dedicated to the 306 British and Commonwealth Soldiers executed in WW1 for so-called cowardice...