Friday Flash Fiction - The Skater
The low solar street lights glow warmly in the fading daylight as Jana coasts down the street on her board. She lets the sensations of moving swiftly through the night calm her turbulence of emotions. Voices and the smell of food cooking on barbecues shimmer from the balconies hidden behind the vertical gardens that creep up each tall building. Small drones zip by on errands while people cruise by on bikes.
But Jana barely registers the familiar sights, too lost in her grief.
A tram toots, and she swings to the side, raising her hand in reflex acknowledgement to the driver-less vehicle as it passes. She pushes in time to her breathing as she speeds up – out, push, in, push – until the road eases downhill, and she can see the skate park a block away.
Jana knows the surfaces and transitions of the park well enough that the soft evening light is all she needs to skate it. Rolling through the entrance she exhales finding the smooth concrete bowls empty. Perfect—she needs the catharsis of motion without distraction.
Tomorrow, Grandma is going to take the pills that have been sitting in the drawer next to her bed for the last three months. When she first showed them to Jana and explained what they were, a chill had rolled up through her belly and stuck in her chest. She covered it with denial. Gran would get better.
But she hadn’t gotten better, and an hour ago, she had told Jana that tomorrow would be the day.
Dropping into the bowl, Jana pushes herself hard, carving up and down as she whips around the transitions, flows unchecked by anyone who might caution safety. Frustration and anger pour out with each near-miss of landing a trick on the coping. Sliding down rails gives temporary release from the dread weighing her bones. But no trick can outpace the countdown in her mind, each grinding into her sense of helplessness.
Jana knows it is Grandma’s choice, made with courage and grace, but she isn’t ready to say goodbye. Grandma is her rock. Grandma is how she makes sense of the world.
With an eruption of speed, Jana rips too fast into an aerial spin and loses control on the deck’s edge. She instinctively pulls herself forward to avoid cracking the back of her skull and rolls to a shuddering stop. She pounds the hard concrete with her fists, tears falling for the first time since she found out that tonight was the final night she would sleep under the same roof as her Grandma, crying into the deepening dusk until the night sky is the inky dark of the long-steeped tea they would drink in the late afternoons, with conversations which danced between the profound and the mundane.
The distant street sounds mellow as night falls and Jana’s tears fade. She skates slowly home, plucking a ripe mango from the tree outside her front door to share with Grandma one last time.