Rabelos in the Duoro river, Vila Nova de Gaia, Portugal – Credit: Diego Delso, published under license CC BY-SA
The wine is transported from the valley to Porto in tanker trucks these days, but Rodrigo still made his way down the Duoro on his father’s Rabelo boat loaded with barrels. Now that the tourists were gone, he felt a sense of peace. It was a quiet morning on the water. He lit a cigar, what his wife had called a “stinking weed,” and enjoyed its pleasing aroma.
“Ah, Matilde. You always failed to understand the simple pleasures of life. I am not an ambitious man nor do I desire to become one.”
He scanned the water fore and aft. The shoreline was empty. No one would see that he was about to lose one precious barrel, which would mysteriously sink to the bottom rather than float.
Matilde left him for another man, or so he would say. No one would find her body. The Duoro has many secrets.
I wrote this for the What Pegman Saw writing challenge. The idea is to use a Google Maps image/location as the prompt for crafting a piece of flash fiction no more than 150 words long. My word count is 149.
Today, the Pegman takes us to Duoro Valley, Portugal. As usual, I did a bunch of Googling, and focused on the history of the Douro Valley and river and Rabelo boats.
I feel like I’m cheating slightly because I’ve written similar stories in the past, but that’s where the muse took me this morning. Oh, the maximum depth of the Duoro river is 131 feet, and let’s say that’s where my protagonist decides to lose his one special barrel.
To read other stories based on the prompt, visit InLinkz.com.
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Interesting! You have talent.
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Thanks, Sadje.
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I guess there was more than her disliking his cigar…
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Much more, but 150 words didn’t leave a lot of extra room for descriptions.
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I feel your pain, James!
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Good story, although with recent events I think we’ve had more than enough horrid treatment women. There’s a guy in FF who used to murder two or three women a month in his story poems. yikes!
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I balance the scales in my other writing challenge today.
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Good man.
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Yikes! Well, what goes around comes around, so they say.
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Too true. Maybe his next wife does him in.
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Oh dear, and Rodrigo seemed like such a nice man, too. So I guess the moral is that any man can turn out to be a brutal murderer with no problems of conscience? (Shiver.) I just hope the man who really cared for Mathilde finds out what happens and Rodrigo pay the price for his crime.
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Well, maybe not any man, Joy. The word count limit didn’t let me develop his motivation, but the back story is that he caught her cheating on him with another man. Of course, that’s not justification for murder, but who says he was a nice man to begin with?
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My guess would be that if he murdered his own wife, then yes, he probably wasn’t that nice of a guy to begin with! But it’s hard to tell sometimes, isn’t it?
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I don’t know. If he’s capable of murder, I’m pretty sure that tells us a lot about his character.
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Sorry I wasn’t clear — I meant that you can’t always tell ahead of time who’s going to turn out to be the guy who murders his wife. But yes, once he murders his wife, that tells us a lot.
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Ah. I misunderstood. Sorry.
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I cant look it up right now, but isnt Rodrigo the name of the villain in the play Jo March first stages in the early chapters of little women? I saw a video on port and those barrels do look big enough to put a body into! There was also a shot of the river boats, loaded high with barrels shooting the rapids so at first I thought it might just be the cost if doing business. Nice story! Mine is about port, too.
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Dear James,
It seems divorce might have been kinder. No doubt there’s more going up here than cigar smoke.
Shalom,
Rochelle
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That’s very true, Rochelle.
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What a cruel end. then again, sounds like she asked for it. 🙂
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Maybe she didn’t. We’re only getting his perceptions and know nothing really about what happened between them.
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I hope somebody sees him, and police divers recover the evidence. Good story, James
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You never know. Thanks, Penny.
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Matilde under water, high price to pay for ditching Rodrigo!
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Maybe Rodrigo isn’t a nice man.
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No coming back from that! Was she such a terrible nag that he felt he had to send her to Davy Jones’ locker, or where their worse crimes? devilish spin on the pic James
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A picture tells a thousand stories, Lynn. Thanks.
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My pleasure
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Ah, I feel like you rarely write a murder story or am I wrong on that? At any rate, I love where your muse took you.
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Thanks, Alicia. Not too often, No.
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