A Tale Written on a Whim

It is the second day of autumn and a blog day for me. I have myriad ideas for writing, but often my thoughts have to do what’s happening in our society currently. I definitely have my opinions but am afraid my point of view differs from about half the people I know, so I refrain from posting about issues that are controversial unless I can stay neutral. And that’s hard.

 Today, I decided to begin this piece focusing on the word “fall”, since it is the season. In all honesty, I had no idea of the direction my words would take me. So here it is -- a fiction piece about a woman I named Felicity.

It was the first day of fall and it was her birthday. Felicity was forty. Forty. How in the hell had that happened? She was over the hill. Yes, THAT hill. And she hadn’t yet had a baby. Well, there was the abortion when she was twenty-two. Did that count? All it counted for in Felicity’s world was regret, and guilt, and sadness all wound up together, a knot in her heart.

No one knew. No one who cared about her now knew. She bore the burden alone, not thinking about it much, but not forgetting either. How could she? Shit. San Diego. She had made a promise to herself never to return to that city again. Never. San Diego had become synonymous with loss and loss didn’t feel good. She had lost everything in the back room of a small clinic near the ocean. The fetus had been taken, her integrity had been absent, at least for that short stretch of time, and Jack? Well, Jack had disappeared the moment she had told him. So that was that. Done. The last thing she remembered about that day so many years ago was leaving the small, stucco building and searching for her car. Where had she parked it? The rush of the warm, sea breeze and the smell of fish and salt wafting up from the docks a block away had made her a bit nauseous. She remembered that. All she had wanted was to go home to Escondido, miles away, and sleep.

Wow, how vividly that memory had surfaced! With luck, it would settle in the recesses of her mind now as it always did. Felicity looked around the corporate lunchroom at all the faces, old and young, men and women, fearing perhaps that someone was reading her mind. Ridiculous.

            She slipped the last bit of iced tea through a straw, stood, and walked slowly toward the silver, elevator door. At the moment she reached them the doors swooshed open and there, directly in front of her was a couple. The woman, Felicity knew, worked in an accounting office on her floor, and the man? He looked at her, tilted his head to one side, and smirked.

            “Felicity?”

            “Jack.”

  

Perhaps this tale could go on, but not now. It’s time for me to get back to the new novel I’m writing.