A Fireside Dinner

By Peter Bowden

The fire came alive with a whisper and a snap. He built it with care, like a man arranging memories. The pine needles smoked first, then flared. He laid the fish in the skillet and watched the skin curl, the butter bubble and hiss. The scent rose into the trees. He didn’t speak. The fire did all the talking.

The coffee boiled. He poured it black into a battered mug. From his coat, the flask—always the same flask, old as a promise. A splash of whiskey, a stir with the back of his knife. He drank. The night folded in around him, velvet and full of stars. Somewhere beyond the firelight, the trees whispered stories older than roads, older than fire itself.

He ate the fish while the wind moved gently through the pines. Each bite tasted like the river, like the quiet ache of things gone and never missed until they’re remembered. When the mug was empty and the fire low, he leaned back against the log. The sky stretched wide above him, stitched with starlight. And for a long while, he simply breathed, and let the night carry him.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Things Are Quiet

By Peter Bowden
Image
The house was quiet now. The mornings came and went like old friends who had grown tired of the visit. He would sit at the kitchen table with his hands around a coffee cup that had long gone cold, staring at the empty chair across from him. The ache was not loud, nor did it rage. It sat in his chest like a stone sunk to the riverbed, unmoved by the current of passing days. He thought about the way she would hum softly while drying the dishes, the sound slipping through the cracks of his memory like sunlight through a dusty window. He missed her without ceremony, without grand displays. It was a dull, persistent throb that never asked for attention but never left him alone. Sometimes he would walk the old path down to the river, where they once threw crumbs to the ducks and talked about small things that seemed bigger then. The air was thick with the scent of pine, and he could hear the water moving over the rocks, just as it always had. It made him angry sometimes—how the world did not...
Read more

She Was Always Sad

By Peter Bowden
Image
She was always sad, though most people never noticed. She laughed at the right times, nodded when spoken to, and never once caused a scene. But there was a heaviness behind her eyes, like clouds that never moved, just hovered quietly. At the coffee shop, she always took the seat by the window, looking out as if waiting for someone who never came. The truth was, she had once loved with the kind of fullness that makes you believe you’ll never be alone again. A hand in hers, a voice calling her name from across a quiet room, the warmth of another body curled beside her in the coldest months. And then one day, the world cracked open, and he was gone. Just like that. No storm. No explosion. Just silence where there had once been everything. So she carried that silence. Not with drama or despair, but with the quiet dignity of someone who had known something precious and lost it. Her sadness wasn’t bitterness—it was love, still alive, with nowhere to go. And so she let it live inside her, s...
Read more

One More Trip Around the Sun -- 70 Years, 840 months 3,652 weeks 25,567 days 36,817,200 minutes 2,209,032,000 seconds

By Peter Bowden
Image
He woke to the smell of dust motes dancing in sunbeams, a golden, forgotten incense that had perfumed every birthday morning since memory began. The air was a tapestry woven from the scent of old paper and the distant, murmuring sigh of wind through ancient trees. Outside, the world hummed with an invisible, electric current, a quiet symphony of cicadas in the noon-warm grass and the faint, sweet decay of summer.  Another year had passed, not loudly, but like a bird moving through high branches—seen only if you were looking. He didn’t count years much anymore. They gathered on their own, stacking like stones in the garden wall.  It wasn't a number so much as a whisper on the wind, a faint echo from a time when the world was a carousel of blazing, untamed colors, now softened, like a watercolor left too long in the sun. His fingers traced the cool glass of the window seeing not merely the garden beyond, but all the springs and autumns that had blossomed and withered there. Each...
Read more