Flash Fiction

They lay entwined on the determinedly dishevelled bed, they were sweating, they were beautiful, they were almost as one. They had been apart for some considerable time and although he always carried her heartbeat with him and she, she always whispered his name on the wind circumstance and reason dictated all that they could be.

To be together as they were now, each had travelled precariously across a yet again war torn Europe. She had picked her delicate way from England. An England in the grip of what seemed to be a new ice age. And he had come mostly by train from St Petersburg. In these deviant and restless days it was no straightforward matter to travel let alone cross a continent to meet on an almost deserted Greek island. To meet for one night, to watch the sun set, feed each other’s senses, love and leave. But that was their devotion, their novena. Whilst others paid their homage to deviance and war they fought for themselves and the little breaths that entwined them.

As the sun that had patiently set now slowly rose, they embraced. Each with gentle tears knowing that they would soon and yet again and as inevitably as all the other times become apart. But the backdrop of memories that they kept between them would now have a little more embroidery. A silken tapestry of a sweated image in an unmade bed on a deserted Mediterranean idyll.