I have a Wednesday night writing group. We do prompts, and drabbles, and it’s a good time. Everyone comes out with something so different! They’re short snippets – the drabbles are only supposed to be 100 words, a warm-up for the later prompt. I’m trying to remember to post my favourites as I go.
But this particular drabble prompt – Messages – hit something hard in my heart, and I didn’t try to keep it to 100 words.
He sends her a message, and two miles away, her mobile chimes.
He wants to talk. He knows she’s busy. He’s worried, is all. When she’s got time.
She’s looking through the telescope, and ignoring her phone. Not because of him. She lost a friend, recently. She doesn’t know why. She asked, several times.
No answer.
No message. That, in itself, is a message, but it hurts, and it’s frightening. Now every delay from every message could be the beginning of a new message, a message of absence and silence.
She watches the stars. She thinks about radio signals, travelling through space.
It would take so long to get a message out there.
You wouldn’t know when to stop hoping, she thinks. People used to write letters, before the internet, the telephones, the telegrams. Letters, carried by ships at sea, or tiny reports on bloody homing pigeons.
What news from the front? she thinks, focused on a distant star. Who knows? Keep an eye out for pigeons. Or the postman. Or radio waves.
Now, you don’t know when to expect it, or when to stop expecting it.
You don’t know when the silence is safe.
She has her headphones on. The music helps. Songs have messages, have meaning. You can consider those at your own pace. They only go one way, and you aren’t expected to answer, or know the right thing to say.
The music fills her head. She doesn’t hear her phone chime, another friend, sending another message, to let her know that he’s thinking of her, and he hopes she’s okay.
She is okay, in this moment. She doesn’t expect messages from the stars. Their silence has no weight.
They just burn. That is all they have to do.
Nothing if not verbose 