“Treehouse” — FWG Flash Fiction for 3/15/2025

Does a memory you try so hard to forget ever leave you?

The prompt is:

https://pixabay.com/photos/lighthouse-australia-south-australia-2910670

TREEHOUSE

“It’s perfect!” Jane, the bride-to-be, gushed as she gazed at the lighthouse and the blue ocean beyond.

Joey, the future-groom hesitated. “Um, I’m not so sure.”

“Oh, come on. Just imagine Father Delaney in the doorway—” She opened her hands as if holding a bible. “You and your groomsmen around that way—” She gestured with her right arm. “And me and my bridesmaids on that side.” Her left arm moved to match her right. “It’ll be perfect.”

Joey just shook his head. “I’m not good with heights,” he mumbled as a memory flashed into his mind. A memory he thought he had expunged from his brain.

“Don’t be a scaredy cat. Come on!”

She grabbed his hand and dragged him down the fence-lined pathway toward the lighthouse. Its pristine white paint practically glistened in the sun.

“Just imagine me walking down the path behind my bridesmaids while you wait for me above.” Jane sighed, lost in her own fantasy. Her voice was wistful. “I’ll enter this door a bride and emerge a married woman.”

Standing at its base, in Joey’s mind, the tower became a massive oak tree. Staring up at it, he became a ten-year-old again.

Squeezing his hand even tighter, Jane pulled Joey through the door and up the winding stairway.

As they climbed, the stone stairs became wooden slats nailed to the tree’s trunk. Joey felt himself climbing hand-over-hand up the makeshift ladder leading to the secret treehouse deep in woods. The treehouse he and Trudy, the girl from two streets over, had found one summer.

When Jane stepped out onto the observation deck, she became Trudy, leaning over the flimsy railing, and that long-suppressed compulsion overtook him again. After two running steps and a lowered shoulder, Jane’s body, just like Trudy’s, lay broken below.

THE END