For Remembrance Day: a short story “Barn, 1917”
(This piece of flash fiction originated as an exercise in a creative writing class. The task was to tell about a barn and a man whose son has been killed without saying it is a barn or that the son has died in the war.)
I push open the great doors. They groan, echoing my pain.
This was his special place. He hid here when he’d been naughty, behind the bales, under the cart. Just a child – and little more than a child when he went away.
Not much straw left. Who’ll put more bales in after the next harvest, and after all the harvests to come, when I am gone?
Rustles and squeaking. They say there are rats there too – fatter and bolder than these.
The beams are sturdy and there’s a coil of rope in the corner.