G for Gossip is a Cruel Story: #atozchallenge Fiction

Gossip is a cruel story that runs on wheels, smashing everything in its path— people, hearts, careers, lives.  

I’m the exception, thought Lisa, , walking through the rolling fields of grass, I’ll live. The afternoon sun kissed her pretty but weathered face much as her husband had done minutes before, when he’d strolled off, sated, for a cigarette. 

This whole picnic was his idea. The wine, the satin sheets, the velvet cushions, the lovemaking under open skies in broad daylight, all in an attempt at leaving everything behind after a nightmarish year.

 She kept walking, her eyes dazed by the sun, her bare legs scratched by the drying grass, her eyes seeking the horizon where sky met ocean, far below.

But as she walked, she saw her girl dancing ahead of her, her gangly thirteen-year-old legs skipping her ahead like a grasshopper, then fading like a mist in the seaside air. Her girl would never walk in this warm grass, never feel this breeze in her hair, never watch eagles wheeling in the blue air, nor hear their piercing cries.

Because her friend had proven to be not her friend, Lisa’s only child had chosen to hang herself rather than face a loveless world. A few facebook messages from a gang of tramps pretending to be a boy in her school had driven that little girl to distraction. Jeers, taunts and gossip had done the rest.

Lisa turned to look for her husband, as she balanced at the edge. She saw rather than heard the surf on the rocks far below.  Her daughter would never know the thrill of kicking pebbles down and watch them melt into the distance, nor stand in awe of that pounding surf that would one day reduce those rocks to dust.

When Lisa fell, it was somewhere between intention and accident. She was not the exception, after all.

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