The wind billowed the girl’s skirt and set the flowers around her to gentle swaying. She stood in her grandfather’s tulip field as the blooms bobbed around her in rows of yellow, red, orange, and pink. The sky was a brilliant blue with cotton candy clouds scudding overhead. It should have looked like a painting.
The flowers rolled down the gentle slope to the road where a long line of soldiers stood waiting. He was among them. The low rumble of a motor approached, and the bus came to a stop.
One by one, the soldiers climbed the stairs and disappeared from view.
He looked back at her just before it was his turn. She imagined that their eyes met for a final instant before he boarded the bus that would take him away from her.
That was the day he disappeared from her life but not from her heart.
If you like flash fiction, you might like my other story Switched.
