The Paperweight: Magpie Tales#12

The dust motes danced in the sunlight streaming through the window as it reflected off the glass paperweight.

A whole year gone already she thought, time flies. It hadn’t ever occurred to her before, how irrevocable death was, the emptiness was still there, and it went on and on and on.  He had bought her the paperweight on one of their visits around the antique markets, it was so colourful and she had cried in delight when she saw it, and just like a child, she just had to have it.

It was only a week later that her mother’s cousin had flown home to the other side of the world and that’s when their love affair had really started. She watched him as he walked away and she knew she would never see him again. This man who had made her heart flutter and who had said, ’I love you’ in his soft accent which burned into her soul. ‘We will write,’ he said as he went through the barrier into that no man’s land to fly to another world.

And they did for three years, blue paper, white paper, tissue thin, filled with words of love and tenderness. Then they stopped, no letters no messages until that fateful phone call from his sister who had found the letters hidden in a box.

‘Both killed outright,’ she had said, ‘he and his wife. A head on crash, they didn’t have a chance.’

The sun made the bright colours seem as though they were dancing and she touched the paperweight letting her fingers caress the roundness of it.

‘Is that yours Mummy?’ asked Alicia as she watched her mother, stop with the duster still in her hand.

‘Yes, yes, it is and in it holds some happy memories.’ She answered her small daughter.

‘I can only a see a fish, where are the memories Mummy?’

They’re there, you just have to close your eyes, and then you can see them,’ she said, ‘just close your eyes and you’ll see.’

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