***2X WINNER OF @YAROMANCE'S 'BITE-SIZED LOVE BUFFET 2024'***
❝ Walking through life with you, ma'am, has been a very gracious thing. ❞
- Errol Flynn, 1941
A POST-WWII SHORT STORY COLLECTION.
D E D I C A T I O N For all those who go through this life seeing the beauty in each and every one of us.
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THE COFFEE'S TASTE ISN'T right. Nancy Clifton grimaces at the acidic liquid instantly; yet she risks another sip only to find that even her memories of joe's scarcity whilst her brother received it as powdered C-rations overseas are not persuasive enough.
Thus placing the mug down, she knows why her coffee is suddenly crummy.
Nancy has yet to see the man, who, for the last year, has biked past Martin Clifton's house at seven sharp.
The wall clock says it's a quarter after.
She curses at her panic, for it's not like his destination changed. Nancy herself has only visited the field of headstones at the block's end once to see her brother's casket lowered into the ground. She hasn't returned since, though she knows Martin would want to see the faces of his three sisters hanging over his grave, their differences forgotten.
But Ellen is a homemaker now.
Gertrude, a former streetcar conductorette, is a secretary.
And Nancy is an admirer of a man on a bike.
It helps that her morning muse is a dreamboat or else she'd be in the kitchen, alone with the checks from the VA and the envy that perhaps she would not be so invisible to society if she, like the man, accepted the dead's new form.
Pushing aside the burgundy curtains, she peers out the window for the bike but instead spots a man walking up the drive. With brown hair shiny with pomade and a toned body in sturdy coveralls, he is the man on the bike; the man who is now with a bouquet of red daisies and eyes she can finally see.
