Letters and Nonsense
Emily Sat at home, she worried about Harry, she always worried about him. Out of sight, out of mind, couldn't have been more wrong. He was due leave soon, but she didn't know when he'd come to visit her for their standing afternoon of tea and cake, or rather tea and rolled jam sandwiches to be taken on the green or up a tree, as was their custom, providing the weather was fine.
Harry would always come to visit her in uniform saying: "Give the neighbours something to talk about."
It was comments like this that made Emily believe in a shifting dynamic; friendship to romance, war did that to people, it was due to a shy awkwardness that had appeared when he spoke sometimes.
She was open to it but she was afraid of pushing him too much knowing full well the things he was living were changing him .
She decided to write him a letter, he had after all begged her for nonsense from home, apparently light hearted anecdotes were being used as currency and she had witnessed a lovers spat which had involved two of the funniest insults she had ever heard.
A woman walking home from the shops with her husband carrying the groceries. She wasn't watching where she was walking tripped him up, groceries rolling off in all directions with the man's ego bruised as he sits among the debris:
"Look what you've made me do, you stupid moose." Her reply:
"Are you hurt? no? then stop complaining you irritating turnip." A line to which there could be no reply save laughter and speedy reconciliation.
Letters were so old fashioned but they had to be done, they were the only real way to get anything anywhere anymore.
She pulled her sheaf of paper and her nice pen out onto her desk she had an hour before she had to leave for her hospital volunteering.
Dear White Knight,
She paused, looking out onto her little church spire, she imagined their old dragon snoring away merrily. In part that's why she had chosen this house.
She returned to the letter scratching black swirls onto the creamy sheets, soon stopping again. Something felt wrong.
What was it?
A distant motor, then unnatural silence, no birds.
Good Lord a bomb.
She flung herself under the desk her paper following as all around the earth devoured her.