DAY 140. TIME FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT.

Today’s blog will only take you a minute to read. 

Our writers’ group exercise a few weeks ago was to write a piece of flash fiction. In other words, an ultra short story written to a specific word count.

The subject we were given was “A face at the window”.

This is what I wrote.  Let me know what you think and whether or not you like it. Did you guess the ending?

Fixation

I’ve spent my whole week at work thinking about her.

Yesterday she was wearing a red shawl around her shoulders.

I swear she stared straight at me.

I am haunted by that stare. I see her every day on my way to and from work staring from that window on the upper floor of the mansion block where she lives.

I keep hoping for a sign. She must have seen me looking at her.

“You’re keen to walk the dog all of sudden,” Kathy, my wife, said to me last night.

But by the time I reached the flats it was dark and the curtains were closed.

Who lives there? I wondered. I’ve asked around but no one seems to know anything about her.

Kathy and I have been watching the brilliant BBC series “Hidden” on iPlayer. It’s all about a woman who is being held against her will. I began to fantasise. What if my woman – because I’ve begun to think of her as my woman – was being held prisoner? You do read about these kind of things happening.

This morning I couldn’t wait to leave for work. I even left the house a few minutes early in the hope that I might see her.

To my surprise, there was a removal van right outside the flats where she lives. I had a hell of a shock because there she was being carried out by two men.  I did a double take. She was naked and the red shawl had been draped carelessly over the lower half of her body. What was going on? Had I been right all along about her having been abducted?

I was just about to cry out when I realised what a fool I had been fantasising about her all these weeks. To think I had been driving myself mad and losing sleep over her when she was nothing but a dressmaker’s dummy!

© Andrea Neidle, My Life in Poems