Friday Fictioneers – Duty

~ neilmacdon

 

unamed-from-ted-strutz
PHOTO PROMPT © Ted Strutz

She’s a good girl. She’ll carry me up the mountain. She prepares my meals and launders my clothes and bathes me. She mends and sews and brings me healing herbs.

This is how it is. I carried her in her youth and now she carries me in my old age. It’s the circle of life. At the end, she will carry me all the way up the mountain to the stars.

But who will carry her when her time comes?

 

Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge set by Rochelle Wisoff Fields to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here

68 thoughts on “Friday Fictioneers – Duty”

  1. Your narrator can only hope and trust that his carer’s compassion will continuously earn her friendships that maintain to the end of her life. Almost unbearably sad for me, this piece, but its elegantly conveyed message is so perfectly constructed.

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  4. This echoes the fears of who will take care of us when we become old and weak. Although in this case, he worries for his child when she gets old. I’d like to think that she will receive what she gave. But sometimes life isn’t that kind.

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  9. I have a strong feeling that you wrote this from a woman’s pov, and that it is the child’s mother speaking. Well done; it carries conviction.
    I expect one of her sister’s daughters will carry her when the time comes; I hope so, anyway.

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  18. This is poignant. I had that thought when my dad died from the opposite viewpoint. I had no interest in having kids until then. Now, I joke that I’m going to be the guy somebody finds in his apartment two weeks after he died, half-eaten by cats, and I don’t even have cats. I have time, but time has a funny way of running out. It’s scary.

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