Competition Twenty-One Winning Flash Fiction: Coming Home From the Mill At Least Is Certain (After LS Lowry) by Emma Phillips
Everything here is gun metal grey and you, a half-formed soldier. Smoke billows with industry, burns like funeral pyres. The smell of a bonfire sends you back. Your father said it would make you a man; you returned to him a shadow. Edie places your hand in hers, but it never stays warm. You brought her the shiver of trenches.
You were the lucky ones, they said: the brothers, sons and lovers who lived. Plenty of jobs at the mill for a lad, but your boots are filled with ghosts. Albie faked his papers first, grinned when they said they’d accept you. You feel his hand on your shoulder now, whenever you spot his girl. “He were ‘andsome,” she muttered when you came back and could only whisper “Sorry.” The machine gun clatter of the factory floor replaces your need for words.
Noise is salvation. It’s silence that kills. “Keep talking,” he’d say as you carried them. You wrote for a nail brush that never arrived, their blood like rust on your skin. Albie was stronger, braver than you. Wherever he’d gone, you’d have followed. Sometimes you feel your pockets for smokes, roll another for him.
“Like brothers,” he’d say, when they asked were you kin, and “who put you in t’doldrums?” You hear his voice in your ear sometimes, the tread of his feet down your spine. He let them cry until nothing was left and said tears were no use saving. This were God’s country, Albie claimed, and they’d be home before him.
Work holds you upright, like it did then when he left you alone in Belgium. You die anew at the end of your shift at his house with nobody in.
Emma Phillips grew up next to the M5 in Devon, which lured her to cities and airports in search of adventure before she returned in 2013. Her words have been placed in the Bath Flash Award, Best Micro fiction 2022 and this competition, as well as online and in print. Her flash collection Not Visiting the SS Great Britain is now available.
Coming from the Mill by L S Lowry
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