Nandita Shandilya
Stories (1/0)
The Old Man and the Birch Tree
The autumn leaves crackling their way through the mildly cold breeze falling gently on the ground were as melancholic as Z, reading the newspaper. The headline read,’ 3 years since the earthquake that shook the country’s soul. Still repairing broken lives and hearts.’ Z remembered. He remembered sitting in his office a 100 miles away getting a call at 10 in the morning, he had just started with his day. He remembered hearing his niece’s broken voice. He remembered telling her to calm down, to leave her mother lying silently on the floor covered in red and rubble, to find shelter under the dining table, to stop crying, to slowly breathe and close her eyes. He remembered telling her it was going to be okay until it wasn’t. Until the sound of heavy panic-induced breathing turned mute. He had lost the only family he had. Three years later he sat on the bench of the park on which he had spent the last 10 summers before the earthquake watching his only family grow with a glow that made life itself blush. The park never felt the same again. There was no glow. Only a silent shade of cold remembrance of the bliss it used to be.
By Nandita Shandilya3 years ago in Humans