#FridayFlash 50 and Thursday Tales 1: Who says you can’t go home?

Woohoo! FridayFlash 50! *insert happy dance* Ok so I've separated out stories from the rest of my blog so as to make it more appealing for those who are not so interested in the horse world. Please feel free to follow! The list is looking very sad and empty at the moment. hahaha

This story inspired by the photo below as presented by Thursday Tales. As always, comments very welcome!

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Photo courtesy of Deviant Art

She stood at the foot of the rickety old bridge with her heart in her throat. The mist rose off the water adding an eeriness to an already tense situation. She had left, 20 years earlier, swearing never to return. And having done so, she was dead to them.

She wondered if time would’ve changed them. Her friends. Her family. Whom she’d left behind out of a desperate need to see what lay beyond the bridge. She vividly recalled her mother watching her go. Sad and unable to understand, but willing to accept that the strange girl she’d raised would never fit in. Crossing the bridge was taboo, and strangers from the other side were never accepted.

She’d travelled and she’d learned. She’d seen things the village shaman would never allow her to speak of and discovered that the world was made up of villages not unlike her own. Oh sure, the behaviours and rules changed from place to place. Some welcomed foreigners while others killed them. Some valued strength and courage while others revered wisdom and intelligence. But really, each town set its rules to whatever standards it deemed important, and each town expected its inhabitants to follow them. That basic fact never changed. And try though she would, she never found a town she felt at home in.

She worried that the village so large in her memory, would seem small in comparison. And she wondered if she was making the right decision. She hadn’t even intended to come here. She didn’t recognize the woods around her – it had been another lifetime when she had walked through them as a young girl on a search for a new life. But she knew the bridge. She’d spent her childhood staring at it and wondering. And she knew her one-time home lay on the other side. Where travellers were not welcome.

She knew she should leave. That she had to turn from the village as she had once before. That crossing the bridge would mean death. But never had a family member returned. Surely that would be treated differently from a stranger. She was no threat to them. They had known and loved her as she had them. As she wanted to again.

She crossed the bridge. A feeling she barely recognized as hope propelling her to the place she once called home. She looked thorough the mist to the trees and saw a man she recognized. The shaman had changed little from her memories, and as her second foot hit the ground on the village side of the bridge he spoke:

“You should never have returned.”