It's Still Life

Part 15 & 16: 1842, Cagnes-sur-Mer, France

(Brigid’s Diary, Winter: 1842: one year on)

Where is Felreil?
That’s what I want to know.

Where is he in his black frock coat, moving as if Boreas lived in its pockets, striding streets and alleys in long English-blackened boots, as though Provence’s glossy night had always been part of his plan?

Mon Dieu, Felreil, you make the stars miserable.

But I love you.

As much as I do not.

(From Felreil’s Diary: Summer 1842)

I found the hill steeper than I remembered, or else I had brought back less of myself than I meant to.

The stick bit the dust before me, then my bad leg, then the other, and so I came up between the olive trees in a heat so white it seemed the sky had forgotten how to hold colour.

I had thought often enough of this road to mistrust it, memory is a useful falsifier, but the house stood where it should, shutters half-drawn against the afternoon, and the stones at the verge gave back the same dry light.

The coat on my back still carried the navy’s cut, the little authority of it, though salt, sun, and conscription had worn it thin, and I felt again what I had felt in every port: fearing that a uniform arrives before the man inside it does.

Then I saw her at the door …small at that distance, still as if listening rather than looking — and for one step, then another, I understood nothing except that I must not fall before I reached her.

If she knew me by my limp before my face, I could not blame her; I had not planned to come home altered, and home, in its mercy, had chosen to wait.

The End — La Fin

Previous Instalments – To access all of the instalments on one page, please use this link. Written for Denise’s Six Sentence Story including the word plan. Images created with Midjourney; all writing is my own original work.©Misky 2006-2026.