Lightning Flash Writing

This writing sample is a flash fiction story from my chapbook Won’t Be By Your Side.

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Bread Crumbs

A photo of my mother on her wedding day: nineteen, ready to marry, eager for something new.

My father now: widowed, two eyes looking older than the man who takes my hand and leads me across the street.

“I’m an explorer,” the man tells me. He wants me to come with him on an adventure. 

I say, “My father,” and his face darkens. 

“I know your father,” he says, and grips my hand tighter.

I know my father can’t lose me, too, but it’s possible he doesn’t even notice I’m gone. I believed he loved me when I was one of his girls but now I’m all that’s left and it’s never enough.

The man has a limp but he knows his way through the woods. He’s surefooted, pulling me up the hillside. When he stops, he lifts me onto a tree stump and touches the hair I cut myself. My father couldn’t wash it like my mother did, the way she combed it to graze my shoulders. He let it tangle and ripped the brush through until we were both crying. I cut it off because I thought it would make him happier, one less thing to deal with, but the way he looked at me then is how this man is looking at me now.

“You can grow it out,” he says, his tongue darting out of his mouth as if tasting the cool forest air.

I think of how I might look when it’s long again, when I can wash and brush it on my own. I wonder if someone will take a photo of me at nineteen, if they will put it beside the photo of my mother, if there will be similarities.

He offers me his hand, helps me hop off the tree stump, begins to pull me along once more. I see the knife glint in his waistband. I think of the phrase “like a lamb to slaughter.” I realize he never said my name.