Today’s writing prompt and my response.
Day four for this week. Use the prompt however you like, one at a time, or pen a short story over as many as you like.
‘I feel so alive.’
The mourners wore dark colours. It was that kind of funeral. The old-fashioned type this old old-fashioned town excelled in. In the high-naved church, relatives, friends and those who felt they should be there for business or other reasons, sat shoulder to shoulder on the hard pews. Blooms of lilies stood on every surface, luminously white against the dark stone and wood.
Like ghosts. That was Gilly’s thought as she hunched in the front row, eyes roaming everywhere but on the coffin perched on its sturdy trestle below the pulpit. The reverend was going on about what a kind, good man Grandfather had been, and how he would be missed by his loving family, his friends, former colleagues and community.
Gilly would miss him, badly. After Grandfather retired two years ago, they had hung out a lot together, especially during school holidays. She chewed her lip, the image of their last outing tattooed into her brain.
A hot day, a picnic by the lake. Grandfather, Gilly and a gaggle of her friends who loved the old man nearly as much as she did.
‘He’s always up for a laugh, isn’t he?’ her best friend had said, only two weeks ago. That was when Grandfather led the way on a rented bicycle, wobbling his way along the old train track turned cycle path, ‘until I get my cycle wheels back under control,’ he’d shouted over his shoulder, grinning like a twelve-year-old.
The picnic.
‘Swimming time!’ Grandfather had peeled off his shirt and trousers, revealing bright red swimming trunks below a grey-haired chest and a stomach many men decades younger would be proud of.
They all tore off their own outer clothes and ran after the old man onto the small, rectangular jetty.
‘I feel so alive!’ he shouted, and jumped into the still, cool water.
They fished him out ten minutes later, dead from a heart attack.
The reverend came to the end of his sermonising, the organ struck up a sombre hymn. Gilly clasped the hymn book, stood, and smiled despite her tears.
To her, Grandfather was very much alive, and ever would be.
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