Young Writers Society

A/N: This is my entry for Elinor's Beatles Song Contest, based on the song of the same title. If you're not familiar with the song (how dare you), you might want to check out the lyrics so you can understand where I got some of my inspiration from! Although I used every single word I could for this to still count for flash fiction, I'm not super proud with this and it needs a lot of work. Enjoy, nonetheless!

He is a weathered Dutch man, weighed down and creased with wrinkles not so much because of age but because of sorrow and pain. On a run-down Holland dock, he rolls his wheelchair over the salt-bleached boards and stops close to the edge, the rim of the wheels bumping against the railing. The North Sea is dark in the morning, but he relaxes in his theatre seat and watches as hues of blue creep from the east. The light brings him hope, and he thinks that perhaps finally he might catch some sleep without fear…

Tick, tock.

He was a lovesick Dutch man, dressed sharply in a crisp soldier’s uniform which bore the salty tears of his sweetheart on its shoulder. On an eastbound train, he took a quiet window seat apart from his boisterous comrades and pulled up the screen so he could watch the Holland scenery as the engine chugged along. The fields were beautiful in the early morning mist as the windmills caught the first rays of gold, but he could hardly enjoy them, last night’s bewildering farewell a relentless ache in his chest.

“It’ll only be a couple months. Don’t cry so, lieveling. I’ll be back by Easter Sunday, I promise. I won’t even be fighting.” With his thumb, he brushed away a strand of hair that was sticking to her wet cheek. “I’m just guarding prisoners. Silly ol’ prisoners. What is it—are you afraid that I’ll never come back?”

She shook her head. But the desperation in her glassy eyes and the utter, complete silence of her voice—had she spoken but one word that night?—kept him rooted to the ground, even when another soldier called out for him to hurry.

He grabbed her by the shoulders. “Lieveling? What is it? What aren’t you telling me?”

Still she didn’t answer - she never did. He called out her name and tried to grab her wrist as she turned and fled, but in another moment she had disappeared behind the corner.

“What’s wrong with her?” a soldier asked.

If he spoke, he knew emotion would get the best of him. Already, tears of frustration, confusion, and foreboding stung his eyes, so he balled his outstretched hand into a fist and walked past the soldier wordlessly.

In the late afternoon, the train spit them out in a foreign land at the foot of a prison. Everything around him was ugly and gray, the soil gravelly and the trees bare. A string of prisoners were at work digging a well. When they saw the fresh wave of guards spill out of the train, the prisoners laughed and a few spat at the ground. He didn’t like the look of them: too at ease, too confident.

Right away, without rest or provision, he was selected out of his comrades, handed a sight rifle, and stationed at a watch tower at the corner of the prison. He had been looking forward to having a warm meal and bedding down after the long journey, and as he climbed each rung of the tower’s ladder, his dreary confusion from earlier morphed into a boiling anger. He felt useless. Any fool could sit in a tower and keep his eyes open. Why should he, of all people, be stuck here in this God-forsaken place while the love of his life was troubled by some unknown grief?

When at last a relief soldier arrived, the sky was dark and he was dizzy and enraged. As he climbed down in the dusk, he didn’t notice the wires wrapped around the tower’s wooden posts and the fence it bordered; even during the day he would have been blind enough with anger.

But, nonetheless, while shuffling irritably to his quarters, he tripped on something and whirled around to glare at it. Miraculously, he had unearthed a taut wire in the sand. He bent down and lifted it curiously, and with growing unease followed it closer and closer back to the tower, when suddenly there was a bright white flash—

When he woke again, someone was dragging him out of the rubble. Lights from lanterns swung in confused arcs over shards of wood, metal, and bright, awful red. The sound, the panic! An incessant ringing assaulted his ears; he screamed for it to stop, to stop!, but he couldn’t even hear himself.

Time went on. The ticking was silent at first, but soon it became muffled—he might have been grateful for that if he were still whole. Now only half a man, he couldn’t feel grateful for anything.

She never visited him, even at the hospital at home, and until the doctor wrote it down on a slate, he didn’t understand why.

"She left the morning of your accident with her family for America. We don’t know how to contact her. She doesn’t know what happened."

Tick, tock.

The ache in his chest is as strong as ever, but at least…

Hah! Blinking from the shards of light that sparkle in the ocean, he grimaces at his pitifulness.

At least on the edge of that dock, he’s as close to yesterday as he can be. Yesterday is where she is, beyond the horizon where sleepy cities are still bathed in darkness, and yesterday is also what was, when he was in love with a girl and she was in love with him, before she had to leave him by her parents’ orders, to a Separatist haven in America.

Almost every morning he comes here, drawn like a magnet to her presence across the sea. Sometimes he brings a paper and ink to write her a letter. Sometimes if the letter isn’t too pathetic, he’ll take it to the post office and deliver it to any given city in America, not knowing in the slightest if she settled, let alone where. Otherwise he’ll ball up the paper and throw it as far as he can into the churning waves.

“Lieveling,” a voice says, very faintly, from behind. “I’m home.”