The International Writers Magazine: Life Stories

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Pictures • Andrea Ledbury "Mummy, Mummy, I can’t find them, where have they gone?" Elsie cried sitting upright in her bed. Tears streamed down her face and she shivered with fear. It was two-thirty in the morning and Elsie’s mother had rushed in to her five-year-old daughter’s bedroom as soon as she awoke hearing her crying.

"What’s the matter sweetheart?" she asked as she wiped her tear-stained cheeks, "What can’t you find?"
"The pictures," Elsie exclaimed, "They were here under my pillow." Elsie turned in her bed and started fumbling under her pillow, she lifted it to show her Mother, "Look they’ve gone, when I was asleep I saw the pictures and now they’ve disappeared."
"It’s ok," her Mother soothed, realising what had made her daughter so distressed, "It’s normal, you’ve just been dreaming."

Fifty-two years later Elsie dropped to her knees sobbing hysterically. Her kneecaps ached with cold as the wet, soggy grass seeped through her flesh-coloured tights, yet she barely noticed.
"How could this happen?" she cried, "Everything’s gone, it’s all ruined. Why us?" she exclaimed, looking up to her husband Max, devastation set in her eyes.

Max knew that this would crush her. It had taken him six days to get her to the house. If there was anyway he could fix it, he wouldn’t have let her come at all. But this couldn’t be fixed and he knew that she had to face it. They both had to come to terms with it somehow.

They said that it had been an electrical fault, a problem with the wiring; apparently it had started in the cupboard under the stairs. They also said that Max and Elsie had been lucky that they weren’t in the house when it happened or worse in bed asleep. Elsie had challenged this attempt at looking on the bright side by arguing that had they been in the house, they may have noticed that it was in fact on fire and been able to stop it before it got so out of control.
It started with a tiny spark and within minutes proliferated into gigantic, roaring flames, which tore their way through Elsie and Max’s home licking away their entire life’s possessions and memories.

Coming to the house had been worse than Elsie had expected and she wished she had stayed at the hotel. It was no longer her house, it had been invaded and she no longer recognised it. The blackened walls, the singed carpets, every surface littered with ash. Even now she was outside she could still smell the stale smoke. It was as though it had become embedded into the inside of her nostrils, just as it had into the walls of their once beloved home. Elsie felt that she just wanted the ground to open up and swallow her whole. Her life had gone up in flames and she wished she had gone with it.

Elsie had always lived for her memories. Max often teased her calling her a hoarder, although she preferred to call herself a collector. It had become a lifelong obsession and had started when she was a young child. At that time she liked to collect erasers and badges and would purchase one each time they went out on a family outing. From her late teens however, she became less fussy as to what the object was, as long as it was a momento of some sort. Examples of these momentos included concert tickets, restaurant napkins, flight boarding stubs and photographs to name a few. Each item held a story and Max loved to sit with Elsie as she recounted the memories associated with each one. The fire had taken all of this from Elsie and Max fretted as to how she would get past this.

Still kneeling on the sodden grass Elsie looked down at the remnants of a half-melted photo album which she gripped in her hand; the only thing to have survived. Her hands shaking she slowly turned the pages looking at the only pictures left of her past, pictures of her childhood.
Thinking back to her Mother’s words that night at the age of five Elsie realised that she still had all that she needed. "Remember Elsie," her Mother had said, "Just because you are asleep, your mind doesn’t switch off, it never stops thinking." Elsie knew that everything would be ok because as long as she had her mind she would have her thoughts. She may have lost all of her material possessions, but she would still always have her memories.
© Andrea Ledbury October 2007
andrealedbury@hotmail.com>

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