Flash fiction competition: the shortlisted stories (2)

The Melting Point

by E E Rhodes

I met him at Kemi’s tiny airport. I could tell straight away that he hadn’t wanted to come. His mom might even have bribed him to get on the plane. 

When he was young I’d got him an Orvis junior rod and we’d gone fishing in the creek. He got a bite and dropped the rod in panic, and it had taken both of us to rescue it. He had that same desperate look now.

On the road he stared blankly out of the window. Lapland’s relentless snow fields and frozen trees didn’t impress him. He glanced at me and shifted away fast when I caught his eye. Not just the landscape that was iced over. I turned the truck’s heater up and he unclenched half an inch. I hoped it was just shyness, I too had been gawky at thirteen. And we’d not seen each other for almost nine months. 

At the cabin I showed him where to stow his gear, before talking him through the stove and gas boiler. I joked that as long as he didn’t blow us to kingdom come or burn us down, it’d all be fine. He shrugged, finishing the hot chocolate his mom had reminded me was his favourite. I’d have remembered on my own, but it was nice she’d told me.

He’d kept fiddling with his Nintendo console and seemed surprised when I showed him the DS I used when the internet glitched. It wasn’t a total Jack London existence. While the cabin’s furnishings were sparse, there were crammed bookshelves and an old fishing rod on a couple of hooks above the door. He took the book I offered him and relaxed a little further.

That night I heard sighing, but when I whispered a question he didn’t answer, feigning sleep. Fair enough. Some things have to be re-earned. He’d seen my moving as a personal betrayal, even if his mom was the one who’d originally left me. Even though I wasn’t actually his biological father. I was the most consistent thing he’d known. Until I wasn’t. He hadn’t been able to reconcile himself to my going somewhere so far away.

In the morning, when he looked outside, there were icicles twice his size hanging off the conservatory roof. I asked if he wanted to help at the reserve for the day. He shrugged. Not reluctant, exactly, but desperate to be persuaded. I remembered obscuring my own adolescent need to be wanted with feigned indifference.

I told him we could go fishing after I’d finished my rounds. Cut holes in the ice. Hang out. Maybe bring back some fish for supper. I could see him considering, still wanting more from me. Needing it. I nodded towards the front door, it was his Orvis hanging above it. He followed my eyes and recognised his old rod. He frowned at the otherwise spartan interior. 

His pinched look cleared, and, smiling like the sun on ice, he crossed the room and hugged me.

E E Rhodes is an archaeologist who lives in part of a small castle in Worcestershire. She writes flash, short stories and prose poetry to make sense of it all. She’s currently finishing a flash novella set in South Wales.