Flash Fiction

I remember it was late June of forty-four, just past my hundred and sixteenth birthday. I was giddy like a child. I remember it because the country was in turmoil. The invasion of the French coast had failed and failed spectacularly. Initial reports of the D-day had quickly come to refer to it as disaster day and the military planners were looking dog eared and shamefaced.

That was not why I was giddy, no; I had just acquired my first aeroplane, a Hawker Hotspur. A no longer required experiment. And I was excited. When you are a member of the sapiens branch that lives on average for three centuries the joys of observing and observing from a distance become, quite frankly, an obsession. It was during the Great War that my brother died, observing. He was a mere eighty-seven. It is said, by the family, that he was not distant enough. Well, I was not there so I couldn’t say but we were very similar and I have never been seen too close. Now I had a new option, a new viewpoint. Observing from above. I had, of course, been up some of the newer, very tall buildings. But that was static, grey and dull compared to the new possibilities on offer.

I remember the thrill of getting up alone for the first time. The joy of firing the movie camera that I’d had attached in place of the gunner. The adrenalin that flowed dodging the other fighter planes and still trying to capture the unfolding disaster day.

Looking back from the further vantage point of another one hundred years passed those captured images are sharp. My memories as I’ve aged have grown sharper still. In watching, I know I miss the lost. I miss my brother most of all.