FLASH FICTION:NOTHING HAPPENED. The light didn't change. The phone didn't ring in the middle of the night. A crowd didn't suddenly clear. He was just there.

Standing on the opposite platform in the streaky yellow fog of the train station, reading a newspaper. As if it was the most natural thing in the world. After six years of waiting, and not waiting. Never knowing.

Hoping against disappointed hope. She crept closer to the edge of the platform towards the cardboard cut-out of her husband that some evil genius had put there to torture her. He lifted his eyes from his newspaper and looked up at the electronic information board and she suddenly felt as if she was at a great altitude, faint, dizzy, and gasping for air, unable to look down.

She wanted to scream, to shout out his name, but her mouth was like a different country and her head seemed to roll around and all the things of the world started to move and swim around, the billboards and the benches, the station and the sign, and she was falling through them, towards the wet floating ground.

All that was still was him. Like some terrible statue, looking at his watch as the world crumbled all around him. He folded his newspaper and put it under his arm. Her mind was a horrible blank. Her train arrived. She walked sideways along, trying to look through the windows. Crowds streamed off the train, converging on her before and behind, but she couldn’t see them. Or not see them. All she could not see was him. Every day, every hour, for six years she had looked at the places where he had been, and lost a little more of what there hadn’t been any left of for so long. She didn’t even know what it was any more, but only that it was lost, and lost again, and all that was left was the memory of the pain.

She dodged and pushed her way to the end of the platform. To have and to hold.The train pulled away, revealing another train slowing to a stop on the other side.

She turned and ran, down the stairs, through the crowd, across the station floor. For richer or poorer, in sickness and health. Another crowd came towards her. She saw the escalator to the opposite platform, like some kind of mirage, empty, shining, going up towards a white heavenly light. She gripped the black rubber banister and sprang gracelessly up, stumbling off the moving stairs and on to the platform, with arms outstretched, eyes wild. The train doors shut. She fell forward on to her face with an awful, choked cry, and felt a bitter taste rise. Till death, till death do us part.Tears gathered behind her eyes and when she looked up he was there, looking at her from the window of the train, quite calm. In a way that made her blood run cold.

He opened his newspaper and the train slowly pulled away.

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