Summer Heat (Flash Fiction)

I took a flash fiction writing short course recently, coincidentally the teacher used to be my Breathwork Coach in another life, and I’ve always loved their writing. Part of the course was creating a piece of flash fiction of our very own, using the techniques we learned in the course. Presented here is that piece.

CW: Mentions of death.

Summer heat took my breath in a great sigh as I rolled out of the car to pump gas, the smell of petroleum mixing with the sound of sirens as an ambulance tore by.

Across the street, the open lot I’d remarked on to my wife so many times: “Some developer will buy that up and build a high-rise one day.”

Two years ago, the familiar chain link fence decorated in woven nylon that every construction company across America and around the world uses, sprung up around the plot of land. Today the building has a name and people live there.

I look up into the car at the thought of my wife. If she were there, she’d be inside complaining about how the AC doesn’t run when the engine is shut off. She had a Masters in Public Administration and managed buildings, so it’s not like she complained about it out of ignorance. It wasn’t that she thought anyone could do anything about it; she just wanted the world to know how inconvenienced she would have been in the July heat at the gas station.

But she wasn’t there. Three years ago, she had a name, too.

The overdramatic clunking of the pump shutting off shocks me out of any train of thought I had and I finish the transaction.

The AC comes alive with the engine and I force myself to concentrate on the road. Right out of the gas station, a few handfuls of a few hundred yards, a few pedestrian crossings to pay attention to, the left turn at a light, and I’m home.

Everything I’ve been trying not to think about hits me in the emptiness of walking through the front door. Three years ago, the person with a name would have greeted me from somewhere down the hall, and I’d rush to her, only to be told I was sweaty and needed to shower. We’d both laugh and I’d oblige.

Ghosts haunt my footsteps and I cannot do it. Walk down the hall. I fixed the dent in the drywall where the paramedics stoved it in turning the stretcher, but the scar is still there. In me, not in the wall. Turns out the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns is two weeks in the intensive care unit.

I rush out onto the balcony, trying to get away.

Summer heat takes my breath in a great sigh as tears roll down my face. The smell of her perfume fresh in my mind’s nose as any day she sprayed it. The sound of the ambulance that took her away tears through my brain and I collapse in a heap, sobbing. I don’t want to be right about anything, I just want the last three years to go away, and for her name to be on my lips instead of on the columbarium.