strange bOUnce

Visiting Time (With Audio Recording)

December 22, 2012 — flash fiction, football in the army, old man's story, old people's home, short story, visiting relatives at christmas, visiting time

By Jude Ellery

He lies on top of the half-made bed telling a story that I’ve heard a hundred times.  His eyelids are sealed shut but I like to think that his mind’s eye is alive with the same images he’s conjuring in mine.  Every line or two he loses his train of thought so I prompt him with a question I could answer myself.  “Did it finish one-nil then?”  Yes, he scored the only goal of the game.  He was a striker, he could run fast and take a hit.  He’d taken a whack on the ankle in an army game, years later, in Egypt.  Bruised from the instep right up to his knee, was off duty for a week after that, and never even got a free kick for his troubles.  “How long were you based in Egypt?”  But he’s tired now and either doesn’t hear my words or doesn’t have the energy to reply.  I leave his card and bag of mints on the table and shut the door gently behind me.

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Visiting Time by Jude Ellery is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License