Flash Fiction
“Dad, look, mountains!”
Little Crisie pointed excitedly at the blue, bulbous mountains due north where the river flowed into the fog, her voluminous ponytail bobbing up and down, her arms shaking wildly and forearms struggling to reach over the last rung of the railing.
He smiled, marveling at his little daughter’s excellent eyesight, and squinted at the small, rolling hills in the distance. Not quite mountains, but it does no good to squash her enthusiasm over something as immaterial as semantics.
He rests his elbows on the cool steel of the railing and cups his chin with the palm of his hand.
“Maybe we could get ice cream later on, huh, Crisie?”
“Ice cream!” She screams with redoubled excitement, “later! Later! Love this bridge! The wind is so cold!”
Her zeal makes him laugh, this is the first time in her four-year existence that she has ever declined an offer of ice cream.
Turning towards the river, he can appreciate why; the beauty really is superb.
“Dad!” She is now pointing at kingfishers sweeping the water surface near the river banks and sporadically plunging down and in and then rocketing back up a moment later with their beaks punctured into a wriggling, silver prize.
A wonderful sight, a wonderful river, a wonderful bridge. It used to be one of his favorite haunts as a child when they still lived in one of those ancestral houses overlooking the riverside temples. He doesn’t remember the mountains, though.
Looking up north again, where the fog seems to be dissipating, the bluish protuberances appear clearer now, and more globose. Had he simply missed them as a child, or is this yet another evidence of the vapid unreliability of human memory?
“Dad! Dad, look!” Her innocent excitement is both palpable and enviable.
The hills grow in size the more he scrutinizes them, an effect he incorrectly attributes to the thinning of the morning fog and the lenses of his eyes bending to adjust for the distance. He could look them up at the hotel later today, or, simply, just ask a local.
The ease with which he uses ‘local’ without subconsciously including himself under the umbrella of the term gives him an idea of just how removed he is from his childhood town, and sends a shiver through his back.
“Dad, Dad! Look, lights! They’re flashing!”
Yes, lights; and yes, they were flashing. Why were they flashing?
He scans the shores and canvasses through the flood of people congregating outside the temples until he finds the long, sleek, silver poles lining the riverside mounted with (now flashing) red warning lights. It takes him a while to figure them out- they had, after all, been newly installed and were still alien to the locals, let alone him- and it wasn’t until the sirens blared and the shrieks of boatmen reached the bridge that the jigsaw puzzle clicked into place.
Later, in the car that he had taken too long to get his daughter into, he bribed Crisie with a triple sundae delight at her favorite ice cream parlor in exchanged that she calmed down like a big girl and please stopped asking why the people in the water were screaming so horribly and why, daddy why, would no one help them.
What else could he do? She was still too young to understand fluvial floods and the barbarically indifferent ruthlessness of both nature and its people.