Flash Fiction: On The Shore

Chloe sat at the shoreline, wiggling a bit to relieve the ache from her arthritis. The searing heat from the sun and sand helped the pain, a little, though the tide was coming in, and soon Lake Michigan’s icy-cold water would wash upward to where she was sitting.

She stretched a hand out, trailed a finger through the wet sand, idly drawing a house, a snug little cottage, with cheerful flowers—a wave came and washed over the lines, filling them, and washed out again, leaving the sand smooth. So much of life seemed like that these days, all of her work washed away by time. Dishes cleaned became dirty; laundry neatly folded became soiled; even things stored carefully could be washed away by time, like the holiday tablecloth that had become a mouse’s nest, and now had holes and stains and mildew where she and her sisters had lovingly embroidered sugarplums (the fairy kind) amid holly and ivy.

If she died today, the sands of time would fill her footprints very quickly; she’d never built anything, never written a great novel or recorded a rock song, never starred in a movie or walked on the moon. Her family would mourn her, of course, but their lives would go on. They would sit around the table and laugh as she and her sisters had laughed, while they embroidered that tablecloth. It had been done in secret, while their mother was working, and earned them repeated scoldings for putting off their homework until after dinner. Chloe smiled for a moment, remembering her mother lecturing them, and her tears on that Christmas morning.
( The tablecloth was old, of course... )

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