Flash Fiction on Lit Up
The Echo of Iron and Ash
Closure finds you if you’re lucky
I’m sitting on the stone ledge of the ruined chapel; the one perched precariously at the edge of a cliff that smells of salt and ancient blood.
It’s always windy here, the sky bruised with the memories of battles fought centuries ago.
If I squint hard enough, I can almost see them — the soldiers, their faces smeared with dirt and determination, their cries swallowed by the wind.
They’re like ghosts stitched into the fabric of the land, never fully gone.
The bell tolls.
One.
Two.
Three.
It’s a distant sound, almost submerged beneath the howling wind, but it reverberates in my bones as if the ground beneath me remembers, too.
It was the same bell that tolled when they came for her.
“Get up!” my father roared, his voice like splintered wood.
I was young then, too young to understand what it meant to be broken by history.
They pulled her from our home, her wrists shackled in rusted iron.
My mother didn’t scream.
She didn’t cry.
She only looked at me as if passing some unspoken truth — a truth too heavy for a child’s mind.
The fire they burned her on was as tall as the chapel now crumbling before me.
The smoke tasted bitter and metallic, and it lingered in my mouth for days afterward, as if her spirit had settled in my throat.
I never told anyone about the dreams I had after.
They were strange, fragmented things, full of shadows that spoke in tongues I couldn’t understand.
But there was always one constant: the bell.
It would ring, deep and hollow, pulling me back to that day — over and over again — until I could feel the heat of the flames licking at my skin, hear the pop and crackle of wood, and smell the unmistakable scent of burning flesh.
They say history is a story we tell ourselves to make sense of the past.
But I don’t think that’s true.
History is alive, writhing beneath our feet like an angry serpent.
It’s there in the way the earth feels too hot in certain places like it’s still burning.
It’s in the way the wind sometimes carries voices you can’t quite make out, voices that shouldn’t be there.
I came back here because I thought it would bring me closure, that somehow seeing the ruins of the place where everything began — and ended — would help.
But standing here now, looking at the charred remains of a chapel that could have once offered salvation to people like her, I realize that closure isn’t something you find.
It’s something that finds you if you’re lucky.
There’s a rustling in the bushes behind me, and I spin around, heart pounding.
But it’s just a deer, slender and doe-eyed, its fur matted with mud and twigs.
For a moment, we lock eyes, and I wonder if it knows.
If it, too, carries the weight of history on its fragile bones.
Then it bolts, disappearing into the forest, leaving me alone with the ruins, the wind, and the bell that never really stops ringing.
The sky darkens, and for a brief, unearthly moment, I swear I see her — a flicker of light at the edge of my vision, a figure standing where the pyre once stood.
I blink, and she vanishes, leaving me with nothing but the echo of iron and ash.
Ani Eldritch 2024
