Happy Story Time Sunday! Today, I’m sharing a flash fiction that is dear to me and serves as prelude for a much cherished poem. These two pieces fit together, so I hope they connect and make a complete story for you as well. Enjoy!

Silver Earrings

I slipped my fingers into yours because no one had ever matched my hand so perfectly. It was as if your skin was a knitted glove warming up the evening. I waded through the weeds by your side. The air held the thickness of a summer goulash.

“Will you remember today?” you asked, voice soulful as the morning dove.  

That’s when I noticed a silk moth, expansive amber wings, petrified by too much sun.

You stooped to pick it up. “I will keep this always, to remember,” you said, as I took out a white box from my back pocket, opened it to reveal a pair of handmade silver earrings, infinity symbols.  

“Only if you will keep me always,” I said, pushing the metal symbols into your earlobes before standing back to admire their dangle and light play in the remaining dusk. There was only ever joy in the folds of your eyes. The moth took residence in the white box, and you took permanent residence in my mind. 

We spread a blanket that evening on the field. Lit your favorite citrus fragrances. I sniffed, inhaling excitement, but you would always be my favorite scent. Your silver earrings scraping away, only a slight pain that reminded me even more of the pleasure of you outlined in stars. The smell of sage forest intensified the feeling that we were completing a chapter written long before our births.

Biking by the Graveyard

Crumbled earrings
tattered wings
all that is left of your things.
Useless metal
brittle flight
they tucked you in
solid white.

Now, when I bike by the
graveyard,
I see only stone, white peaks,
heights you would have known,
but you are underneath,
metal rubbing against earth,
the scratch of silver earrings
on my chest.
My gears shift away;
I’m the broken moth,
and you’re my dying flame.

Mountains of unwashed memories;
no one will ever wear that day again.
You have left me biking by
clinging to your little white box,
the keeper of your broken things.