Flash Fiction

The Lonely Birch

A quiet farewell beneath a lonely tree, where grief and dark humor meet.

Illustration for “The Lonely Birch” — Pavel Piatrou

Under a faint breeze, a lonely birch on the hill let its leaves fall, as if afraid to disturb the silence. The leaves swirled slowly in the air, drifting down to the grass. One of them slipped into the loose hair of a young woman sitting beneath the tree.

She reached into her hair, caught the leaf with delicate fingers, and laid it gently on her palm.

“What a strangely beautiful thing you are,” she said, studying the yellow-green pattern of veins.

The leaf trembled slightly in the soft wind, and the evening sunlight danced across it in golden flickers.

“You’ll be happy here,” she smiled, and placed the leaf tenderly on the earth — soil that still bore the marks of a shovel.

She paused for a moment.

“Goodbye,” she whispered, rising slowly.

She smoothed her hair, and the wind immediately caught it, caressing it with something like passion.

She walked away — slowly, from the birch on the hill, and from the makeshift cross with a small plaque that read:

“He kept interrupting my Rammstein.”

Dusk fell.

The shadow of the cross grew longer.

Even love has its limits.

Some stories don’t need much to happen. Just a small shift in how you see things:

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