A very short story that I wrote when bored one day. Hope you like it :)
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The old woman stopped and waited for her husband to catch up, and only when she heard the tell-tale wheezing at her side did she move again. This time she moved slower, staring sideways at her husband as he hobbled with a repetitive rhythm.
His leg always got bad in the cold weather. They’d spent many hours laughing about how he had started to resemble a pigeon trying to shake something off its leg, but as time went on and she saw him struggling on his own she stopped laughing.
‘This was where we first met,’ she said, nodding towards a dilapidated pub across the road. The boards over the door and windows were rotting and covered in graffiti. He didn’t reply; instead he stopped, leant hard against his walking stick, staring down at the pavement as he always did. He hardly ever lifted his head. He took a shaky breath and continued walking. Once again she waited until he was at her side.
‘And that there, that was our first house, remember?’ she said
He looked up this time. In the garden two children were playing, their parents stood by watching. The old man smiled, leant on his stick and continued on his way.
It took almost half an hour for him to reach the front door of his little bungalow. She counted the minutes; he was getting slower. His steps were more deliberate, like someone walking on ice or mud who was terrified of slipping. With a shaking hand he pulled out his key, took a further minute to insert it into the keyhole
The house was cold and dark. Despite the furniture and decorations it looked and felt empty. The only thing that meant anything to him was a single photograph. He loved that photograph.
She waited as he closed the door, took off his hat and coat and hung them behind the door. As always he retrieved the photograph from his pocket and in the living room he replaced it on the table by his favourite armchair. It was them on their wedding day. A modest affair with only a few family and friends, but it was a day that stuck with him forever. While memories of his childhood and days working faded, that memory stayed fresh.
Although she was gone, as long as he had that photograph he felt as if she was always there, watching over him. In fact, as he turned on the heater and settled down for the night, he thought he caught a waft of her perfume on the air. He looked at the photograph and smiled.
‘Ah,’ he said, ‘you don’t need to spend your time looking after me.’
‘I wouldn’t be anywhere else,’ she replied.
He caught a whisper of her voice on the air and smiled again, drifting so sleep so comforted that she might have been holding his hand.
