Driftwood by Joel O'Flaherty

The river brings you gifts from Mother Nature.

They arrive at the crook in the riverbank downstream from Heartbreak Cliffs, where it stinks of despair. They rest in the silt, there, beside your cabin that sits alone in the whispering forest.

You couldn’t hear Mother in your old life, years before; she was strangled by the city and the people and their endless questions. But here it is different, where none but you tread the winding dirt road. Here, she hums a breeze through auburn leaves, she sobs with bitter storms that bruise the sky and wails that smell like petrichor, she whispers her plans for you through rustling reeds. And Mother rewards you for listening.

You drag her gifts ashore, let her weather, gnaw, clean them, until they lie bleached-white and fractured. You build totems with her gifts. Turning hopeless, broken things into something beautiful. A way of thanking the only one who’s ever truly seen you.

The men who came this morning with their shrieking cars don’t seem to understand.

‘She sends me gifts,’ you say.

But as their blue lights flash behind them, their faces twisted in horror, they ask:

‘Did you kill these people?’

Joel O’Flaherty (@byjoeloflaherty) is a young writer from Surrey, U.K. His fiction has been featured in Flash Fiction Magazine, Globe Soup and Fusilli Writing, among others. He spends as much of his life as is financially responsible travelling the globe, which he writes about on his site: the Gossamer Traveller.

Driftwood made the FFF Competition 20 Long-list.

Photo by Andrew Gill – flickr

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