fire and frost | short stories

viii. Florence

A/N: Hey! So this story is entered for @DarknessAndLight's "Writing Your Ending" Contest! The bold parts are provided by Kay herself and the non-bold parts are written by me. Please support it by voting/commenting :) Thank you!

♚ F l o r e n c e

All that was left of it was a picture—tucked away in the corner of one of her drawers, hidden underneath a box, covered by old linens. It wasn't even in good condition. The corners were chipped, the ink was fading and there was a long scratch that ran from one side to the other, connecting them, like a line between two dots, engraved deeply into the paper cutting the man in half.

       Man. Man might not have been the right word, but boy wasn't either, the same way she hadn't exactly been a woman back then and hadn't been a girl either. It was during that time in between where nothing was sure but everything was possible.

Florence thought she would never have wanted to be reminded of that fateful summer of 1952. It was one of the most excruciating and tiresome, and also, the most beautiful and treasured weeks in her life. Yet, here she was, clutching this picture in her grips as she made her way down a memory lane that was secluded in the corner of her mind, where it sat secured and protected yet never forgotten.

          Nobody knew about the picture. Not her five children, not her nine grandchildren and certainly not her husband. This was all that was left and it hurt to think it had to be hidden clandestinely this way.

       After all, what this picture resembled was not something even she could put down in words. While it may be true when they say that a picture is worth more than a thousand words, for Florence, this picture was worth more than her heart and soul. It was her everything, all because of the arrangement of the smalls dots of black and white that created the figure of the one whom she had always treasured, even whist letting him reside in the nooks of her heart.

          Oh, there were pictures of him elsewhere, in their house. He was on many walls. He was even in her bedroom. And, how could he not be? Those pictures captured the very mesmerizing and life-changing days of her life, ones where, in her conscious, she had felt the tug of fear and thrill, of happiness and misery, of anger and love.

But he wasn't hers on those pictures the way he was on the one tucked in the drawer. Because this was the picture taken at the end of their journey together, when she finally known that this man, standing next to her with his arm casually draped across her shoulders, possibly for the last time in both their lifetimes, was not someone she could easily let go. He would not be someone she could just erase from her head.

The engravings he had felt in her heart would be there for the rest of her life. She would constantly be reminded of the contagious laugh, the gentle touch, the crinkles of his eyes, the addictiveness of his kiss, the softness of his hands on hers. She would be reminded of his body humming against hers, his ragged breath near her ear, his hasty lips on hers, and his fingers trailing the length of her body. But most of all, she would not forget the soothing of his words, the gentleness with which he had cured her, fixed up her broken insides.

And all of those memories, all of those feelings, all of those words were condensed in this: a picture, where he was gazing at her like she was the most precious in the world, the answer to all the questions, the solution to all the problems. It was her in his eyes, he had said, and even after all these years, after everything, she still believed him.

She had never quite figured out when her journey with him had started, but now, it was clear that he was sent her way long before she had even met him.