Between The Black and White (Flash fiction version) - tragedy

Water gushes over the windscreen in waves as unrelenting as my grief. The streetlights blurry starbursts in my struggling vision.

Black cloud hangs with menaces above, banishing celestial light from view. The bottle bangs my teeth, even at this low speed. But the bourbon tastes like freedom spilling over my tongue.

'It’s like dancing at the end of the rain' she’d say. But only when she was sky-high happy. I never danced with her. The rigidity of my nerves and the well-structured failure of my confidence built a prison around me. I never even tried to escape.

I promised, in her final days, as time and options drained away, that we would dance. She smiled, touched my cheek and said 'I never needed you to be anyone else.'

I’ve never seen the end of the rain. Only an occasional merging of droplets and air that wet my face and left me damp, disappointed.

She often told a story of how she saw it once, as a kid, in a windless field. How the drops fell like a curtain on the corn. How she stepped forward, out of the cloud cover, and was no longer getting wet. The edge of the rain still visible, a shining wall of tiny prisms in the morning sun.

She held out a hand and touched the tears of heaven. She was no longer standing in it. She was no longer standing at all. Spinning and stretching, turning and twirling, bowing and bending. Dancing at the end of the rain.

Her lithe steps took her between worlds; one wet, one dry, one black, one white. But I knew she lived for the grey, the beautiful greys of life.

Just once in her time had she seen this marvel. But it stayed with her, like a loyal dog. The memory bounded after her through the towering high rises of her childhood, along the busy streets to school. It accompanied her around the green university campus and down the dull corridors of her office block. It followed her to our wedding and watched while she danced with her father instead of her groom.

Another car sounds its piercing horn. I'm over the line. I clumsily emerge from my daydream and a moment of cold runs through me. But memories are all I have. Memories and a gold band on my finger. And a promise.

I take another swig from my bottle of freedom and it warms me through. It tastes like our first date at the steakhouse.

A lightning flash illuminates the road. Skeletal trees come into sharp relief and sear into my vision when I blink. Like a burned-on memory. Memories and promises are all I have.

The storm is huge and unmoving. It’s not often they come with such little wind, to hang around like an uninvited guest. But this one is here to stay, for a little while.

A few minutes more and there it is. In the clear sky ahead, stars are revealed like flecks of glitter on a sugar-paper ceiling. My moment is coming. Her moment. Our moment.

The rain hasn’t stopped, I’ve just reached the end of it, driven through the magical gateway. I pull over onto the verge and grab the silver urn from the passenger side, holding it firmly to my chest.

I get out of the car and shut the door. There’s a five-bar gate separating me from the field. It’s not raining on my bit of verge, but it is raining behind the car. I’m finally here.

Droplets from the gate soak through my jeans, cold accusations against my thighs as I trespass onto the farmland.

She was right. Even in the dark, this is an extraordinary sight. The edge of the rain, the fringe of the storm, the place with no grey area. You’re in or you’re out. Unless you dance.

I twirl. A smile spreads across my eyes before my lips catch up. I brush a tear from my cheek, or was it a raindrop? My feet are finding their rhythm, finding their timing, finding their beat. My shirt sleeves stick to my arms, water trails down my neck.

I open the lacquered urn, and shake it away from me. Kelly begins to leave her aluminium jail as I begin to leave the confines of my insecurities.

Only she can see me in the dark. I move between the wet and dry, black and white.

I spin and stretch, turn and twirl, bow and bend. I don’t need music, she’s singing to me. Her dull ashes spill into the rain, onto the field. She is the beautiful grey between the black and the white.

I keep my promise and we dance together for the very first time.