Flash Fiction Friday 128: The View from Heaven by Miriam Drori

Welcome to Flash Fiction Friday and the one hundred and twenty-eighth piece in this series. This week’s is a 163-worder by Miriam Drori. This story will be podcasted in episode 39 (with two other stories and some 6-worders) on Sunday 27th April.

The View from Heaven

They stood, she and he, embracing in the centre of a perfect garden. Flowers all around. Pinks, reds, yellows, purples, whites. Water cascading down the rocks into the pool. Maturing plums and kumquats nested by sun-frolicked green leaves. Sweet, juicy fruit waiting to be gathered and consumed.

Over there, on the same level, stood a large bald prism. One triangular end thrust out through needle-sharp pine leaves. Acute angles pointed and menaced. Inside the prism, as clear as if its walls had been transparent and its position much closer, people wandered in a daze, struggling to grasp the horrifying enormity exhaled by tragic reminders.

“It looks quite near,” she said. “Could we walk there, down into the valley and up the other side?”

“Do you want to?” he replied in question.

“How long would it take?”

“Oh, about seventy years, going backwards.”

She glanced at him with a frowning half-smile. “We’d die before we got there.”

“Just as well,” he said, without smiling.

I asked Miriam what prompted this piece and she said…

When I published this story on my blog, the people who liked it were the ones who recognised the accompanying picture. So I’m glad of the opportunity to explain. The beautiful view from our beautiful garden includes the prism-shaped building that is part of Yad Vashem, Jerusalem’s Holocaust museum. Click here to see the photo.

It was delightful. Thank you for sharing it, Miriam.

Following careers as a computer programmer and a technical writer, Miriam Drori began writing in order to raise awareness of social anxiety. The scope of her writing has widened since then, but she hasn’t lost sight of her original goal.

Miriam has had a few short stories published online and in anthologies, and is due to have her first novel, Neither Here Nor There, published later this year by Crooked Cat Publishing.

Born and raised in London, Miriam lives in Jerusalem with her husband, two sons and a cat. When not writing, she enjoys walking, reading, dancing, listening to music and visits from her daughter who is studying in Tel-Aviv.

Miriam blogs at http://miriamdrori.com.

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