A/N: This is a short ficlet I wrote for my friend, a fabulous writer named Megan Crewe, and was based on the world of one of her original novels, 'Blood of the Rose'. She's asked for a piece that reflected what I'd read from the book. This is what I came up with, way back in about 1999.

His youth, he remembered. Days spent in the cornfields of gold and yellow, of blazing sunlight on his skin, the crystal blueness of the skies, an almost irrevocable image, etched on his mind with acute and detailed precision. On the farm, the tawny-coloured workers, stacking up bales of hay in the arid heat, while he escaped, thin, gawky little boy of eight, down into the fields, arms extended, knees skinned from trips, stumbles and falls, into a wilderness of childhood dreams.

He’d lie there, in the everlasting flood of sunshine, flick the flies that landed on him, watch the flutter of butterflies go past him, listen to the concert of birdsong above him. Life itself knew no boundaries. On the farm, in his youth, it could have lasted forever, for all he knew. He was oblivious to Time, to the world, to expiring. Life was as abundant as the blades of grass that he plucked from beneath his feet.

He remembered the brown-box camera, worn, half-broken, in his father’s hands, one evening, after work. His greedy, acquisitive fingers, folding over the gadget with feverish excitement at this unbirthday present. That camera became a window into another world, a world where each moment remained the same, stationary, never changing. He’d marvel at the ingenuity of it – those summer days, a split-second, lost forever in time, but caught by the camera, for him to recapture on a whim.

He rocked on his chair, his face contemplative. A roll of thunder growled into existence over the dusty line of the horizon – it reminded him of running home after school, trying to out-pace the onset of rain, to beat Nature, and of invariably losing against it. And of one day meeting the girl with the umbrella, with her long, raven hair and silent, shy smile…and how she had lent that umbrella to him in the storm so that he wouldn’t get wet anymore.

The photos remained untouched on his lap. There were days like this when he could not bear to look at them. The old, wrinkled fingers, long, large, touched at the corners of the worn, glossy paper. Again and again that same shy smile appeared, now a little softer, now a little wiser. The girl with the umbrella had grown.

Pain and death had drawn them together – his father, dead and buried, had left him the golden heat of the farm. He sat there, as he had done in childhood, and talked to the girl who had once lent him her umbrella. Now she lent him support, friendship, stolen kisses in the meadow at night. He had felt indestructible and insecure in turns. On odd days, he had wished his father were there.

His dark-haired wife now, pregnant with their third child – in fact, he could not recall which child it was she had been pregnant with in this picture. She spent most of her time being pregnant, he thought with some effort at irony. Himself now a father, with a brood of eight children, sleepless nights and pointless fights – these characterised the prime of his life. A time of joy, laughter, movement; sadness, pain, misery – and all past in a flash. Twenty, thirty years gone, he could not count with any sense of certainty. His grandchildren, huddled round at his knee…And out came the old camera, battered and worn as never before, but warm and comforting, a dear old friend he kept close to his heart.

Here were his granddaughters, girls of ten and twelve, arms brown with the sun, legs long, gangly, knees muddy. They stood at the river, their heads turned coquettishly over their shoulders, staring at him with wide, cheerful grins. He smiled fondly down at them, the curve wobbling uncertainly on his shrivelled lips. For a moment he would have said ‘Hello, it’s grandpa’, but somehow, in the fragile lunacy of his mind, he knew that the image he saw was not real. The tears almost pricked his eyelids. Where are they now? He thought.

Gone, gone.

On a wayside, in the rain, their battered, molested bodies ground into the mud, face down. Tears had failed him even then. Like the eye of the camera, his remained dry. He was too afraid to weep, for fear of never stopping. His wife, he could not bear to see. All he could remember was the blur of blue as the men had entered and dragged her screaming and kicking, from their tiny homestead. Her screams reverberated in his mind, like the soundtrack of some black and white horror movie. There were days when he could not remember her face. There were days when he could only see the lone girl on the road, an umbrella in her hand, and the pink lips smiling as though just for him.

Golden days of sun turned into a monotony of cloud and dust. War brought darkness to their tiny village, the roads littered with corpses, the skies blackened with the smoke from fires that burnt the houses of his neighbours. He was safe, because they needed his crops, but most days he wished he were dead. If his youth had been characterised by frolicking in the sun, his old age was characterised by blood, grime and nothingness. Hours seemed empty, even the dead and dying became inanimate objects that he became accustomed to. He, alone and solitary, had nothing left to live for. Now all he lived for was to teach the future generations. Now he understood what the camera was for. Not only his window into another world, but also his window into the future. His old eyes, well trained now, caught it all, and the camera’s eye would wink and follow. The child crying in the street; the woman lying dead on the road; the polluted sky at dusk; the grin of the soldier on duty; the half-smile of resignation on the farm-hand by the barn.

He sat now, in his rocking chair, on the porch, the photos on his lap. Now, he was tired. The rocking, slower, slower. He did not think any longer. He held on to his camera and looked at the brown, brown fields before him. He looked at them, and wondered fleetingly and in sudden confusion whether they were really his own. And then he closed his eyes and he remembered. The small, wiry boy in the golden corn…He knew without a doubt that this was his, that it was all his. A faint last breath.

He almost smiled.

-END-