Flash Fiction – Bronwen Griffiths

Ice cream like cherry blossom

Your hand clasped in mine, and how I had forgotten the smallness of a child’s hand, and the cherry blossoms drifting down onto our clothes, each petal the size of your little fingernail.

“Look Nana! The flowers are falling like snow.” 

Tears welled up in my eyes, and dripped down my wrinkled cheeks, but I could no more stop my tears falling than halt those petals.  

“Why are you sad, Nana?” 

“I have a pain in my hip.” The lie lay heavy on my shoulder, unlike those weightless petals.  

You dried my eyes with your fingers and then you leapt off the bench and went running through the scattered blossoms and you were lovely in your white dress but my heart was breaking again like it had broken all those years ago in the season of the falling cherry blossom. 

When you returned your mouth was a sinking ship.  “Some of the petals have died and people are crushing them with their big shoes,” you said and you started to cry, although not silently like an old woman but loudly in the way that children cry. 

So there we were. A child and an old woman weeping on a bench under the cherry blossoms.

“I wish things could be forever,” you said, after a while. 

“Nothing lasts forever.” I breathed in the scent of the blossoms. “How about we have an ice-cream? I know of a place nearby.”

You sniffled and nodded and off we went. 

“My ice-cream tastes of cherry blossom.” 

 “Mine tastes of kisses.”

“Nana, that’s silly. Kisses don’t taste.”

“This was a special kiss.” 

“What did that special kiss taste like?”

I smiled. “It tasted like honey and cherry-blossom and all good things.”

You looked at me in the manner of an old woman peering over her reading glasses but you said nothing more and, after we finished our ice-creams, we walked back through the falling blossoms, our tread light as those petals.