Friday Flash

Friday Flash Fiction: Her Fall

There was still a drop of blood on his shoe. He’d clean it later, right now there was the woman to watch, and the wind here near the edge was brutal. He took a step closer to it, standing with feet wide apart to brace himself. Looking down, he was amazed to see that she was still there, clinging on, sobbing. What was she holding on for? It was only prolonging the inevitable.

She must have felt his eyes upon her because she looked up into them, the wind scouring her bleeding back. Her golden hair, now whipped into a thousand tangles, was pulled in all directions as the gusts roiled about her. He could see her tears, the bloodshot eyes, eyes that were once so beautiful to him. Now he could barely stand to look at them. But he held the gaze with her a moment, if only to reinforce the fact that he was safe up here and she was the one clinging on desperately, with no hope, the dull rumble of the city below them.

“Please, please forgive me!” she cried and he shook his head.

“It’s too late,” he said, the wind carrying his words down to her, making her cringe. “You know what you did was wrong, you must accept your punishment.”

“I couldn’t help it!” she screamed back up to him. “It was love! I loved him!”

He examined the tracks of her tears on her cheeks, the blood under her fingernails as her hands gripped the ledge as tight as they could. He imagined her with him, imagined them kissing, imagined her curled around him, wrapped in fresh cotton sheets with the sound of the city slinking in through the open window. He imagined her cry out at the pinnacle of her passion, his filthy hands roaming over her perfect flesh, defiling her. He turned away.

“Please!” she begged, slipping a few inches. “I know it was wrong! I know I shouldn’t have been with him, but I put it right! I ended it, no-one knew about the affair, no-one! Please, help me!” The last words were mangled by her sobs, his anger brought him back to the edge again.

“Selfish beast!” he shouted down at her, making her cringe. “You think that I punished you for lust? Fool!”

“I know it was wrong!” she yelled. “But he’s gone now, no-one will know!”

“Yes,” he knelt on one knee, bringing himself closer to her only to emphasise the distance between them. “He’s gone, because you killed him. You took his life to protect your reputation.”

“No! To protect your reputation!” she screamed back. “To protect all of you, all of us!”

“Us?” he said, his upper lip curling in disgust. “There is no us, you are no longer one of us. You killed a man. Don’t you understand? The punishment isn’t for loving him, for letting your lust overwhelm you. The punishment is for his murder. There is no place in heaven for murderers.”

He saw it in her eyes and in her fingertips; the moment she realised that she had damned herself with violence, not lust. He looked down at her wings, crumpled a few feet away, the white feathers sticky with her blood. He looked at his sword, dropped next to them the moment after he’d cut them from her.

Finally, she fell.


This flash was inspired by two prompts submitted to the Short Story Club! The opening line was thanks to one provided by the most excellent Joanna Paterson  (@joannapaterson) which gave me the POV that unlocked the story trapped in my head. The final line that inspired the story itself was from the lovely Jen Brubacher  (@jen_b) both of whom are simply delightful to chat with on Twitter. Thank you both! A story has never been brought to me in quite that way before.

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