'Outside Arcadia' by S A Greene

On the way there we argue about Adam’s driving, or something. Once we arrive, we’re polite. It’s easier. And today’s our anniversary.

To our right lies the lake, muddy-banked and sullen, despite the high sun. To our left a chain-link fence separates us from the woodland, where ancient oaks and beeches cool themselves in the soft green flap of their leaves. We haven’t reckoned on a fence, although we’ve often read the map.

We walk on, hoping the narrow path will widen and offer idyllic anniversary picnic spots, and it does soon open out, but other walkers stand there, staring through the fence into the wood, pointing their phones. We can’t see what they see but we linger, hopeful.

Eventually they move on, and now it’s our turn to press our faces to the fence.  Nothing, at first. Then a sunbeam points out a flicker, a gentle chestnut movement in the glade.  And, slowly, we see what we’re looking at. Backlit by sunshine, half-dipped in a twinkling pond, some with fine-carved heads upturned to branches reaching down towards them: red deer. Hinds.

Time and place dissolve. We are among Nereids.

It’s Adam who breathes first. Better go now. I’m hungry.

But it’s hot and I want to be a deer. To be bathing amongst them, touched only by water, breezes feathering through leaves, the velvet brush of my sisters.

In your own time, duck, Adam says, in that funny voice he uses when he’s trying to get me to smile. I smile.

I take Adam’s hand as our path twists and narrows. If we just keep on walking the path’s bound to broaden somewhere up ahead and the fence will fall away and we’ll find our holy picnic spot and eat and drink and dance again and try another year.

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S A Greene writes short fiction in Derbyshire, UK. Her stories have appeared in other Flash Floods, as well as in Ellipsis Zine, Janus Lit., Mslexia, trampset, The Phare, Maudlin House, Reflex Fiction, Funny Pearls, and a number of print anthologies. This year, she is delighted to be a Resident Facilitator at The Flash Cabin. She tweets at @SAGreene1.