Wednesday's Words on a Friday

On Wednesdays, assorted people have been taking monthly turns at putting up a selection of words which is called “Words for Wednesday”.

We have taken over this meme from Delores, who had been having computer problems.

This month the meme continues here at Hannah's blog.

Essentially the aim is to encourage us to write.   

Each week we are given a choice of prompts: which can be words, phrases, music or images.   What we do with those prompts is up to us:  a short story, prose, a song, a poem, or treating them with ignore...

Some of us put our creation in comments on the post, and others post on their own blog.  We would really like it if as many people as possible joined in with this fun meme.

If you are posting on your own blog - let us know so that we can come along and read your masterpiece. 

I’m hopeless at poetry so I always do a story.

It’s a fun challenge…why not join in?

This week's words are:

1. convalescence

2. rancor

3. empathy

4. expertise

5. dangle

6. tissues

and/or:

1. wander

2. bolt

3. covert

4. tempting

5. sweet

6. familiar

we also have two pictures, which you will see within my story.

Here is my story:

 Working for the FBI had taught me all kinds of skills. I knew all about covert undercover work, the need to search out every possible bolt hole when tracing a bail skip, a murderer, a kidnap victim. My expertise was legendary. Within my own unit anyway. For ten years I'd worn the badge, the gun, the bullet proof vest.

Then I was on long service leave and I'd chosen to wander the country, searching, searching. I knew he wasn't dead, I could feel it in my bones. 

With only a few days left of my leave, there he was. After all that time, I once again looked into his face. His carefully neutral face. No anger, certainly no welcome; no rancor, blank eyes, not even resignation showed on his too thin features. 

I'd felt such empathy, it was tempting to tell him how I'd finally found him.  He'd stepped closer to the abandoned car he'd been living in, let his hands dangle for a moment before shoving them into his pockets.

"You found me," he'd said flatly. "That means others can too."

The car exploded, taking him with it and throwing me back several metres as shards of glass and strips of metal rained down on and into my body.

I had awoken in hospital, learning I'd been unconscious for several days. A farmer had heard the explosion and hurried to the long-ago abandoned field that once grew potatoes and now grew only weeds and brambles.

He'd called emergency services and crime scene techs were soon sifting through what little was left. The car had been filled with explosives and Stewart had ignited it with a home made remote control device in his pocket. It was found some distance away, still clutched in what remained of his hand.

My convalescence was long, with six months spent in the company of a therapist, a psychologist named Anne, who helped me talk through my grief.  Well, she tried. Every day, Annie would sit beside my bed after the physical therapy session and place a box of tissues within easy reach. Thank heavens for those tissues. I must have cried an ocean of tears in those first weeks.

I'd felt so awful, still did. We'd failed him, not noticing the depression beginning, not noticing the changes in him as he hid himself so completely, fooling all of us. Even our mother, who was herself a psychologist. He'd run away two months after I graduated the Academy, while I was away on my first assignment. 

I was finally released from the hospital, with a standing weekly appointment to still see Annie, until she felt I was able to go it alone and return to work. I'd have to take a desk job for at least a year before being allowed field work again. 

Today I was standing in the kitchen of our old home, left to me after our parents died. Memory after memory rolled over me. The sweet familiarity of standing here with Stewart, watching as his clever hands mixed cake batter, then expertly filled cupcake cases, each with the exact amount of batter necessary for a good rounded top after baking.

We'd laugh as we shared the licking out of the batter bowl while waiting for the cupcakes to bake. It was a weekly ritual, starting when Stewart was ten and I was eight. Every Sunday, he'd haul me out of bed and into the kitchen. "Watch carefully Robyn," he'd say. "Someday this will be your job, and I'll be making dinners instead of desserts."

How had this changed? When had it changed? Why hadn't we seen it? He'd been moody and sad through highschool, but most teenagers went through that stage. The difference was they'd get over it. Stewart hadn't. One day he was gone. For a couple of months there had been postcards. Then nothing. For years.