The Runner-up of 2014 Flash Fiction Competition

3rd Prize

Heather Jones:

The Long Path Home

The rusty truck laboured along the potholed track out of the village, churning up clouds of red dust over a group of excited children running alongside. Nyenga stood apart from the other children, her father’s face fixed firmly in her mind. She was fearful for his safety, perched precariously on top of swaying merchandise in the back of the open vehicle. The truck finally picked up speed and the children drifted towards home, calling her to come. But Nyenga stood motionless until there was nothing but a distant speck against the blue sky.

For the next few days, the only talk in the village would be of the traders with their lively banter, the news and tales from afar and glimpse of things rarely seen. They had brought shiny pots and pans, lengths of rope, amber beads, rare groundnuts, wild sun dried berries and sacks of grain. Nyenga had loved the vibrant rolls of cloth, red, yellow, orange, a blue more blue than sky, some patterned with birds and animals or joyful abstract designs. They awakened a longing she had not felt before and her mother’s refusal still rang in her ears.

‘How can we afford cloth Nyenga? We need grain, not cloth. But if your father finds work in the gold mines,’ she’d said, ‘then we shall see.’

Now the traders were gone for another year, taking with them not only their exotic goods, but her father too. She picked up a stick and idly scraped the ground with it, pondering over her father’s last words to her, his insistence she did as he asked. Her friends were still visible, she hesitated, wondering if they would wait, but they seemed to have forgotten her already. She would obey her father.

Nyenga turned off the track by the withered tree, along a path trailing through the bush back to the village. Beside the tree’s bleached and broken trunk she noticed a dark bundle. Digging her toes into the hot sand and squatting to look closer, she prodded the thing with her stick. It was soft and pale grey, like the newborn okapi in springtime. She plucked at it cautiously, raising up a long length of light, silky fabric, like the stuff she’d seen the traders use to shade their goods. Gathering it in her arms, she looked up and down the path warily as though someone might come to claim it from her. She draped the material over her shoulders, wound it round her waist and over her head, twirling joyfully, imagining the dried wild flowers she could sew on for colour.

She sat in the rustling grass swathed in her treasure, thinking about what her mother would make of this good fortune and her thoughts turned again to her dear father, recalling how he’d winked at her as he climbed onto the truck.

Finally, she understood his last mysterious and urgently repeated whispers in her ear as they’d embraced.
‘Be sure to go home by the long path Nyenga’.