General

Sasha weighed the cucumber in her outstretched hand, fingers curled around it just tight enough to keep grip of the knobbly deep green skin. Her fingers easily gripped, it was kinda rubbery really despite the dusting of soil. She knew what it would be like inside, that soft green hue her mother liked to paint the house with, but she had no interest in all that. She didn't care that it would be refreshing in yoghurt or give her cheese sandwiches a new flavour over the coming week; her brain was formulating an idea far more interesting. It would be over in a flash of course, but what a flash it would be. She climbed the railway bridge and waited for the five-twenty. It would whistle as it passed and she'd get a mouthful of sooty steam - but she didn't care. Timing was everything - drop too soon and it would hit that tracks in the worst anti-climax ever, drop too late and it would bounce of the new maroon paintwork. She jumped to hear the whistle, it was coming! She turned to see it round the corner, gleaming in the August morning sun. Then she turned back, judging its closeness by the volume of its noise. Just before it entered the bridge she dropped it, saying two "Hail Mary's." She got a fraction of a second to enjoy the explosion of green chunks that had been Mama's biggest cucumber before the smoke swallowed her.

By Angela Abraham, @daisydescriptionari, February 25, 2015.