Flickr Fiction (and last post for about a week, probably.)

"Are you sure that's what you wanted?" Their feet crunched in the gravel together, left, right, like a forced march at the side of the road. She could feel the tiny rigid stones jabbing into the soft soles of her feet, soft and uncallused and recently pedicured. She stopped now to pick a stubborn pebble from between her toes, standing on one leg and propping her right foot on her left thigh.

"Yeah, I'm sure," she said.

"How do you even do that?" He changed the subject abruptly, not really wanting to talk about things anyway. He could see her silhouette against the glare of what was left of the sun, dusk eating away at the light like a giant...a giant...roach, maybe, he thought. He wasn't much of a poet. But she still looked like some gangly but graceful stork, balanced there for a moment, getting the stones out of her soft feet.

"I had to do it," she said, and he knew she was trying to explain about before. "You weren't there. You don't know. I...wore those shoes to the funeral, you know. I don't know why I wore them out with him. The first time since Mom's...well, anyway. It was a mistake."

They started walking again, just the sound of their footsteps and a distant train whistle from somewhere back down the tracks, a long way from where they were walking now. A little ways from the wooden trestle bridge where he'd watched in confused fascination as she removed first one high-heeled shoe, then the other, and thrown them into the ravine, arcing high in the air to hang silhouetted in the orange sunset light before plunging down and down. Gone. Game over.

And now it was like starting again, maybe.
***

This week's Flickr Fiction was inspired by this photo by Jose Manuel Torriate, as well as a different photo by Doug Smith that I saw years ago and got inspired to write a short story about. This little piece is like an epilogue to that story, which sorely needs revision. Teaandcakes, Littlegoat, The Gurrier, and TadMack are also participating this week, I think. Click on the links to read their versions.