Ernie Atkinson grasped the fading photograph with shaking hands. He couldn’t hold anything steady; the warders gave him his tea in a plastic cup, with a lid screwed on. He called them the ‘warders,’ but they preferred to be called ‘care-givers.’
His granddaughter had brought the photograph, found in his attic. A young woman – a girl really – eighteen years old, sitting on a harvester in a field, beaming, waving her arm at the camera, wearing shorts and a flowing blouse.
His heart might be weak but it beat a little quicker now. It was so long ago – 1947. He peered intently at the smiling girl. Had they really been so carefree? It was his first time away from the city. In East Anglia on a government scheme: all hands to the pump to get the harvest in.
The flashbacks set off neuron explosions in his brain. Remembering: intoxicated with cider and first love; holding hands, kissing a girl properly at last. ‘Copping a feel,’ as they indecorously called it back then. Real love, something never to be experienced again. The beginnings of a life unfulfilled. What was her name? Kate? Perhaps, it sounded about right. But Kate What? His brain refused to unlock this memory.
Her name? Her name? Ernie Atkinson wept silently.
His body on the bed stirred slightly. It showed no outward sign of the shock. Its heart clenched and stopped. Later, a twenty-year-old care-giver would wonder just for a moment who was the girl on the harvester.
Words: Richard Rooney
Illustration: A.I.
Flash Fiction 250
Flash Fiction 250 