Pastureland | flash fiction

She was still that little girl running half-feral through the green pastureland. If Gail sat as quietly as the pots for the evening meal boiling on the stove, she saw herself as she was in the silver reflection, a picture postcard with movement and breath, her auburn hair, reflecting the heat of a golden sun through an open window in late summer.

Later she was barefoot. It was nearing twilight, but the sun was still warm on her skin. Her baby brother laughed from somewhere just behind her making fighter plane noises with his mouth. She could see his shadow just beside her stretching out his arms in what reminded her of Jesus on the cross from Sunday school, but in this case he could have been throwing his arms around the world instead of saving it.

She was not that girl anymore but she did not mourn it. Only noting the changes time wrought. The girl ran still, in and out of the shadows, along a creek balancing on the cool rocks, through a dark wood of dappled shadows. Her shirtless brother, slipping away to jump into a deep pool in the creek where a flat limestone bluff made for a fine high dive after the cottonmouths were chased away with good throwing rocks.

It was the summer after her mother died when she had just turned eleven.