Orange-Tinted Places
A Micro Fiction by Sharon Boyle
The girl listens to the rain drill against the rusted roof. She hunches further into the miniature car. Her mother and father are not here to explain about cars that bump and dodge, or candyfloss, or neon lights, or that plastic ducks were the only shooting targets. And her grandparents barely speak, choosing to slip between the pages of photo albums, their fingers stroking memories.
She knows their favourites: of themselves posing in skimpies on a busy beach; Mama using her palms to push up a toppling tower; Papa grinning in front of a blunt pyramid. They are orange tinted with a fabled sun, as foreign as a fairy tale.
The car lurches. A light flashes. The girl gasps.
She waits, hand on the steering wheel.
She sighs and flips up her tinfoil hood.
She’ll come again tomorrow. She’ll sit in the car. If it starts, she’ll bump along rough roads and dodge rain till she reaches the orange-tinted places where the sun shines like it did once upon a time. And before she heads back to her grandparents she’ll take a photo for the album.
Author: Sharon’s short stories and flash pieces are published online and in magazines including Flash 500, Fictive Dream and Bath Flash Anthology. She likes banoffee pie and having a room of her own (at last!). She dislikes the fact that Sharons are becoming an extinct species. She tweets at @SharonBoyle50