The Osprey at Dusk

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Our Story of the Week is a story about endings from the writer Yvonne Dykes.

Yvonne writes both short stories and longer fiction. In 2014, she self-published her first novel Brondesbury Villas on Amazon Kindle and began attending creative writing courses at City Lit. In 2015, her first short story, A Death, was published in City Lit’s Between the Lines Anthology. Yvonne also writes for the blog Shop Wear Live Design.

Yvonne has been teaching for seventeen years and recently earned her MA in Education at the Institute of Education. She currently lives in London and works as a supply teacher.

In The Osprey at Dusk, Yvonne explores the complicated ties that bind people and when to cut those bonds.

Enjoy!

I drive. You said you were tired, hadn’t slept all night. The journey to the Lakes takes longer than I remembered. There are more cars on the road, the lorries are bigger; they conspire to keep me in the slow lanes, and new underpasses baffle me.

Between the shrug of a shoulder and a sigh, you dig me out, snipe about my driving skills, but I take it. I make a show of forbearance even though inside I’m churning. I want this to work so badly that I allow myself to appear foolish and your criticisms go unchallenged. You think this trip is a bad idea.

I suggest a CD but you can’t be bothered to select one and tune the radio to a news channel. Perfect. It’s as if we’ve picked up hitch-hikers and they’re busy melting the glacier between us using blasts of hot air. My breath evens out for the first time since leaving town and I recall every detail of the day you told me.

I had spent the afternoon tidying the garden. A robin had perched on the severed limb of the rose bush, pruned for winter sleep. The wind blew unruly leaves around my feet as I raked them.Read more…

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