© Eric Wicklund
“Gross.” Eight-year-old Jillian looked at the statue of the naked man and woman kissing. “Is this your Grandpa’s?”
“Yeah.” Tory looked down at the ground embarrassed. “He inherited the cabin from Great-grandpa but the will said the statue had to stay.”
When Tory invited his best friend from school to spend the weekend in the woods at Grandpa’s cabin, he forgot about the statue. Now he wished Grandpa had thrown a tarp over it or something.
“Yuck. Who’d want something like this?”
“I think it was supposed to be Great-grandpa and Great-grandma when they were younger. Hey, let’s forget about this and go down by the stream, Jillian.”
The girl immediately brightened. “I saw some toy sailboats in the shed. Think they still float?”
The two children ran off to play as Tory’s Grandpa looked out of the kitchen window at them while sipping his coffee. Only he knew that the name plate at the base of the statue, buried under inches of mud, said “Tory and Jillian.” His Dad and Mom had been reincarnated. Now all that was needed was time and letting nature take its course.
I wrote this for the Sunday Photo Fiction Challenge for January 28th 2018. The idea is to use the image above as the inspiration for crafting a piece of flash fiction no more than 200 words long. My word count is 190.
I had to think a bit about what to right about a statue of two (apparently) naked people kissing. For some reason, I settled on a reincarnation theme.
To read other stories based on the prompt, visit InLinkz.com.
Neat twist James.
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Thanks.
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The circle of life. Neat twist on an old theme.
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Thanks, Iain.
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Awesome twist at the end. Good thing they didn’t look at the statue more closely. They really would’ve been shocked!
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Interesting path that went down, I definitely didn’t see that coming! Makes me wonder how they’re going to react when Grandpa finally reveals this fascinating family secret. And what they’re going to call each other, now that Tory’s grandpa is also his son!
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Maybe this is one secret that will stay in that older generation, Joy.
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Might work out better, I agree.
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Perhaps it is good not to know. For we might be surprised by who we are pair up with in the next round of incarnations
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Loved the twist. In India, we have a strong ‘heritage’ of reincarnation-themed stories, for it is a key part of the belief system of the Hindu religion, and this has been reflected since ages in the form of movies and TV Shows.
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This is great James. I wonder if they’ll ever discover what happened?
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Probably better if they didn’t Keith.
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Nice twist, I did not see that coming! 😮
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That was the objective. Thanks, Spaceman.
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