Green Waltz

Here is a piece of flash fiction I wrote recently. I am hoping to illustrate it when time allows and when I have decided whether to go down the strip route or illustrated story path?


Green Waltz.

Slender fingers carefully cutting. Outside in deep red, the sun rising, a slow charge against the retreating night. Slender fingers cutting shapes. Outside in red, deadwood limbs sway as light strengthens. Her little fingers, snipping scissors, busy cutting. Red orange sky with hints of encroaching blue now, dry limbs swaying, waving the passing time goodbye. Little fingers collect the cutout shapes, discard offcuts and pick up a crayon. Outside blueness prevails. Busy green crayons colour shapes. Through the window upright and bare against the clear blue sky, the trees. Little hands brush green coloured shapes from the table into the mouth of a sad old leather bag. She goes out, amongst the parched copses under the cloudless blue sky.

A short walk over the hill flanked by the tall, long dead stick men. To the one she chose some weeks before. He stands naked, alone, not the biggest, small, just a little taller than herself. From her pocket a ball of string, old and yellow. Little slender fingers go to work. A paper leaf from the tired old bag, snip the string, slender fingers deftly tying. Again and again, reaching, bending, engrossed, consumed in her repeated work. The sun high in the clear sky burning, watching, a fiery eye witness to the solitary little figure. Steps back from her task.

Finished.

She stares. And stares.

She stares at the little green dressed tree swaying, a rustling dance in the soft rolling air with the hot sun rising. Mesmerised. The high fiery eye staring like it to was mesmerised by the little green tree in it’s waltz with the breeze. hypnotic and strange. She had wondered you see, she had never seen and had to know.

What they had looked like.

Before.



By Darren Hopes