Flash! Friday: Two Waterfalls

by Michael Seese

I'm still chasing that elusive FIFTH victory in Flash! Friday. This week, we were given a photo of Victoria Falls...

 ... and asked to incorporate the theme of "man vs. nature," which I might or might not have done. You can be the judge.

This is "Victoria's Fall."

The flood of tears threatened to carry her away. What began months ago as an occasional trickle had grown into a raging torrent that nearly drowned her every night.

It is said that the individual droplets of water which comprise a river will, in time, return to their source. Victoria knew that someday she, too, would. Until that day – the day she could walk through the front door and tell her parents they were right when they said big-city life was not in her blood – she relied on memories of home to keep her afloat.

She tasted her mother's cobbler, laden with peaches picked from the orchard. She felt the tickle of a butterfly which alighted on her nose, its wings casting a kaleidoscope across her field of vision. She smelled the freshly cut straw piled in the barn. (After discovering boys, she would form a whole new set of associations with the scent of straw.) She even managed to hear in the blare of horns, sirens, and desperate shouts the soothing thrum of the silver stream which bisected her backyard.

These tactile comforts sustained Victoria, and helped counteract the bile which rose in her throat each time another john laid a twenty on the nightstand.


And this is "Over The Edge."

She wavered, her resolve bobbing like a lost cork tossed into a stormy sea.

She toyed with the edge, dancing on the precipice, then pulling back before gravity could win the battle.

She knew that if she took the plunge, everything would change.

Those who surrounded her seemed content to follow the course that stretched out before them. But she could not find comfort in conformity. She never could see clear to just letting herself go with the flow. Her odyssey had been one marked by turbulence, a series of stops and starts, rapids and shallows, eddies and vorticies.

Then a memory came flooding back. That of winter's chill, of being frozen time, fearful of never again knowing what running feels like. That was enough.

I should do it. I will do it, she thought even though a drop of water is not capable of what, through the lens of humanity, could be called actual thought. She let go of the safety of the rock and rode over the falls.

Downstream, somewhere, her new life awaited. She had no idea where it may lie. But she would find it. Until she did, she knew one thing. She was free, freer than she ever had been.

Please share your thoughts on either  your thoughts on "No Escape."