Why I Came Back

apartment building

© John Robinson

He could feel the blood seeping down his calf from his injured knee. He wished he could enjoy the morning air, but he had to finish this.

Just go over the bridge to the apartment complex, find which one is her’s break in, and then wait. She left for university over an hour ago but she’d be back by noon.

He pressed different buttons on the intercom and as each resident answered, he said, “It’s me.”

Only one opened the door for him, but that’s all he needed.

He had found a first aid kit in the pantry, bound his wound, and cleaned up the blood. He was sitting in a kitchen chair when he heard her unlock the door.

She didn’t see him at first in the darkness. Then she turned on the light and gasped.

“I won’t hurt you. Please sit down.”

“Who are you?” She was trembling.

“Please sit down. I need to tell you what happened to your parents.”

She stood in the middle of her living room. “My mother. She shot my father and then committed suicide.”

“No, Nika. I killed them, but that was a long time ago. I’ve come back to tell you why.”

I wrote this for the Sunday Photo Fiction of September 17th 2017 writing challenge. The idea is to use the image above as the inspiration for creating a piece of flash fiction no more than 200 words long. My word count is exactly 200.

I think it was in the film The Bourne Supremacy (2004) that Jason Bourne confessed to a young Russian woman why he had killed her parents when she was a child. It was his first kill, and one where he was specifically manipulated to forget what he’d done. When he finally started recovering his memories, he felt he owed it to the young woman to explain that he had murdered them rather than have her continue to believe her mother murdered her father and then committed suicide.

When I saw the photo prompt, it reminded me of that particular sequence in the movie, so I decided to recreate it. I know that’s horribly unoriginal of me, but it was the very first thing to pop into my head.

To read other stories based on the prompt, go to InLinkz.com.

25 thoughts on “Why I Came Back”

  2. I always go with first impressions. As others say ‘Go where the prompt leads’ – no apologies needed.
    And since I’ve never seen (or read) the Borne series – the whole thing was new to me. 🙂

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    • Well, you could just watch the movie trilogy and find out. 😉

      Okay, I’ll tell you but *spoiler alert*. Gives away important plot points.

      Jason Bourne was born David Bell, an Army officer who believed he could serve his country best by volunteering for a highly secret project, one that would ultimately turn him into an expert assassin.

      Bell was inherently a non-violent person, not a cold blooded killer, but the project turned him into the latter, that is until he was critically wounded during a mission gone wrong and woke up without a memory.

      Long story short, in the process of recovering his memories, he discovered his first mission wasn’t on the books. His direct superior had ordered him to kill a foreign official who was blocking said superior from a deal that would make him rich (or something like that, I’d have to watch the movie again). Anyway, Bourne is in the hotel room ready to kill the guy when his wife pays him a surprise visit. He has to think fast, and kills them both, making it look like the wife killed the husband and then committed suicide. They had a child back home, a little girl.

      Flash forward ten years or so and the girl is now a university student living in low-rent housing in Russia. Through a long series of events, Bourne ends up in Russia, injured from a battle with a Russian police officer who is also a covert agent and assassin, and he finds the girl because the man he is inside never meant to hurt her or deprive her of her parents. When Bell was turned into Bourne, he was so conditioned that he didn’t recall his former life. After suffering from amnesia, the process of recovering his memories also helped him recover the man he was originally, his compassion and humanity. That’s why he had to find her. To tell her the truth and apologize, for all the good it would do.

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    • No. Based on the film I’m recalling, she is in no danger. In attempting to serve his country, Bourne became a pawn of a covert project inside the CIA that only a few knew about. Once his memories started to return, Bourne only wanted to try to make things right.

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