Title: Boy Meets Girl (Again)
Word: serendipity
Challenger: Rory Bremner
Length: 200 words exactly
The first emotion he felt was shame. Not at abandoning her those many years ago. He had been selfish, he knew, accepting the money from her father, taking an inducement… no, be honest now, at last… taking the bribe to end their engagement. He knew that her father had been if not ‘right’, then at least not wholly ‘wrong’. He could never have given her the lifestyle to which she had become accustomed upon her later marriage into nobility. And he had needed the money.
The disgrace he’d felt was that of stupidity. He hadn’t recognised her when she’d hailed him; it was as simple as that. When he’d realised it was indeed her, he had tried, not wholly successfully, to hide his surprise at what time had done to her.
Well, time and the tyres of the carriage that had hit her, crushed her and deposited her body with a quirk of serendipity into the same cemetery where he himself had lain these past six years.
And so they spoke, as spirits do. And they made peace, as spirits sometimes do. And they told tales about themselves. And though they never changed, the stories of their lives always did.
© Lee Barnett, 2013
This is the fifth story in The Twenty-Four Hour Fast Fiction Challenge. There will be nineteen others… Sponsor me to complete them!
budgie's perch 