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.

 

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