Flash Fiction Friday - Struggle

On the road back to town, the rain came, and she was drenched to the skin, but this was less a testament to the intensity of the cloudburst and more to the stark nakedness of the subject. That would teach her not to think things couldn't get any worse. Her clothes were gone, the rain had come, and there was nothing for it but to walk back to civilization in her present sorry state.

She soldiered on, bedraggled and despairing, droplets of cold wetness slamming into her skin, no hope for rescue, just inevitable chilled humiliation. Then her foot slipped on a stone and she found herself prone in the mud, the deluge pelting down around her. The soiled water oozed into every crevice of her being, and she almost lost it right there.

Instead, she laughed at herself gently, then rolled over, lying back in the muck, staring up at the gray sky. She made no move to sit up, to stand, to get out of the filthy ditch in which she lay. Not giving in, not taking it, just resting for a moment on the road, waiting for the rain to wash her clean.

Then she shivered and stood and continued.

---

A parable, if you will. Or perhaps a metaphor. The two things aren't mutually exclusive; in fact, it's possible that they are intertwined inextricably, that all parables must be metaphors, that parables are actually a subset of metaphors even. I'm not sure I totally agree with that idea, but there it is: this is probably one or the other if not both. A metaphor for struggle or a parable about life, but then what parables aren't about life?

I actually began with a totally different thought, all about how April showers bring May flowers, and thus this woman must either be named May or after a flower of some kind. It could have worked; I wasn't planning on making it a joke, but rather a story of a different kind.

But I've done the sex in the rain thing. I thought, as I began this, that maybe this would wind up with sex in the rain, that whoever had stolen her clothes would return and ravish her (there were mythological angles to my thought, perhaps unsurprisingly) or perhaps that both she and a partner had been similarly denuded and would walk back to town, cheerfully naked in the rain, and have a bit of fun.

Didn't happen that way, as you can obviously see from the story. It could have been the pensive way she's looking up in the picture; it could have been the character taking over, making me admire her effort in the face of adversity; it could even have simply been that I feel like this parable is about me all too often, and one of these days I'm going to wind up face down in the metaphorical mud yet again, only I won't handle it this well. I don't know. Whatever the reason, aside from some minor tweaking of words, this was basically how it came out. I had to work the last line a bit; at first it was shorter, then I had some extra words so I made it longer, and then it was too long, had too much stuff in it, so I pared it down again. The duplicate "ands" were a conscious choice, and leaving it spare works for me.

I very much hope, what with PB getting back next week, that more people will join in at Flash Fiction Friday, because it's a new year and a perfect time to start something fun and easy and yet at the same time good for you. Make it a resolution if you believe in resolutions. Make it a date if you have someone to join you. Make it a habit if you've got too many bad ones. Give it a try.

And here are the people I know have participated this week. If you did and you're not on this list, let me know.

• Of course, PB: http://insatiabear.blogspot.com/
• Advizor: http://advizortoall.blogspot.com/
• Curvacious Dee: http://curvaceousdee.com/
• France: http://theworldbegins.blogspot.com/
• Katia: http://katiaswritings.blogspot.com/
• Oversexed Librarian: http://oversexedlibrarian.blogspot.com/
• Rozewolf: http://wordwytch.wordpress.com/
• Scintellectual: http://scintillectual.com/
• William: http://thetrainingofmylovelyslut.blogspot.com/

I have no plans to make a list next week because PB will be back to doing it and hopefully people will be back to telling him they're doing it and stopping this horrible scavenger hunt where I feel bad because there's probably someone I missed whose submission was really good but I either didn't know or got tired of hunting. It's the devil's work, it is. Okay, complaining over. I've visited all of the other ones I could find, and the hunt was worth it. A larger list than I expected, given the relative paucity of the past few weeks.