A quick tale 11

A very brief affair

As love affairs go, hers was a fleeting experience. He was a boy who lived across the street. She was standing at her doorstep waiting for a friend to arrive. He caught her eye and smiled. She smiled back. He asked her for her name. She replied. And the school she went to. She answered. Her aunt appeared on the scene and the following week, she was sent packing away to her grandmother’s house in a nearby town.

Some months later, she was married to an army man who was on vacation. Many years later, she sat listening to the priest who performed her husband’s funeral rites. He was telling her that she had to lead an austere widow’s life from then on. She found herself wondering what it would have been like if she had married the boy from across the street. A boy whose name she never asked.