Flash fiction by Gwendaline Higgins

Bio

Gwendaline Higgins is a French-Australian writer who lives and writes in two languages. Her fiction has been shortlisted for the Francophone Young Writers Prize. ‘I Carried You’ was a runner-up of the inaugural Not Quite Write Prize for Flash Fiction.

I Carried You

You don’t know what it means, but I carried you.

In the hopeful days and nights, the looking-forward weeks, the in-between time that stretched to over yonder, and stretched and stretched, until you.

I carried you, those sleepless nights, with the perfect weld of your too-new body outside against mine, through the fog-stunned times—the wistful times of sing-song whispers and that new knot longingly under my ribs, filling to breathlessness the place where I made you. Oh, how I carried you.

I carried you, the heedless days. Out of trees and friends’ houses, up and out from tangles of bushes, bedclothes and fears, hauling the precarious roar and crash of your emotions, your sleepy abandon over expanses of country, bustling streets and dim-lit evenings. If you knew, the way the weight of you turned heavier in my arms and firmer on my hip, all the ways you became livelier over my shoulders and impatient off my lap.

I witnessed you. I caught the moments, the seconds that fleetingly mattered and that you could not see, catching them like the things that slid oblivious from your hands. I held the memories that would not hold and I carried them too, I carried the mounting cargo of the memories of you as you walked and ran and wondered.

As you walked and ran and wondered ahead.

You carried me.

You carried me to the resting place, went along with those absurd rites they do.

You keep on carrying me, a sometimes-there weight in the stride of your legs, in your eyes that see the world and imagine much more, in your heart that I made. Until the looking-forward weeks have ended like a cliff, and you tumble into what it meant.

You know it now, don’t you?

In the all-encompassing weld of the too-new body against yours, in the sudden narrowing of the world, in the heftier shadow of me in your world that goes on—the wondrous wisdom of how much you were loved.

I have been waiting for you to know it.

How longingly and forever-and-ever-after, how beyond-the-words it is that you were loved.

Oh, how, how I loved you.

They carry you to the resting place. They carry you carrying me. (Those rites are absurd, aren’t they?) How weightless I am these days.

How tempting is the earth: the wondrous, wistful abandon of it. The earth upon which I, once, carried you… How tempting the driftings of the lines—

On the other side, will it be forgotten—just how much I loved you?

Thank you for reading!