Waiting for Spring
Annette Edwards-Hill He says all you need is a warm jacket, if you keep your core warm you won’t notice the cold. You feel warm just looking at him and spend 300 dollars on a jacket. You ask him when you’ll leave the city, take the ferry to an island, rent one of those cars that only have three doors, eat fish and chips on the beach and return on the rough seas. When it’s Spring he says. You wake up to a frost one August morning, the skies are clear. Let’s see the sealions you say. I’d rather kill myself he says. Then he smiles. In Spring, the ground is damp, but the sun is out. He says it will rain in the afternoon. It does. Every day. Until one morning you wake up and it’s snowing, soft grey flakes that float past the window. You run outside together and hold out your hands, a snowflake melts on your palm, you go back inside. When you look behind yourself for footprints, there is only wet concrete. In Summer you book the ferry to another island, standing on the deck you watch the coastline fade away, until it’s just a white line in the thick salt air. You wear your jacket then take it off when you feel sweat drip down your back. The evenings are longer, you go to bed and lie awake in the heat. At midnight it is still dusk. He says he’ll pick you up when you come home. You wait for the ferry that will take you back across the water, to him. Then you watch as it leaves again, without you. You sit in the terminal watching the ferries coming and going, and then the day is gone. As you leave you hang your jacket over the back of a plastic chair and wonder how long he will wait. |
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About the Author:
Annette Edwards-Hill lives in Wellington, New Zealand. Her writing has appeared in Flash Frontier, Bonsai: The Big Book of Small Stories (Canterbury University Press, 2018), Headland and others. She was long-listed for National Flash Fiction Day in 2017 and 2018 and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best Small Fictions 2017. She was shortlisted for the New Zealand Heritage Book and Writing Awards (prose) in 2018. She was the 2017 winner of the Flash Frontier Winter Writing Award.
Annette Edwards-Hill lives in Wellington, New Zealand. Her writing has appeared in Flash Frontier, Bonsai: The Big Book of Small Stories (Canterbury University Press, 2018), Headland and others. She was long-listed for National Flash Fiction Day in 2017 and 2018 and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best Small Fictions 2017. She was shortlisted for the New Zealand Heritage Book and Writing Awards (prose) in 2018. She was the 2017 winner of the Flash Frontier Winter Writing Award.