Electric Blue

• Jennifer Barham, Grade 12
• Short Story
• 2015

“Your wife… horrific accident…not much time…”
Not much time…
He gasped awake, and it took him a moment to realise it had just been a dream. The relief crashed through him, and his heart started to slow from its frantic pace. However, still needing reassurance, he took a deep, calming breath and felt for the warmth of his wife next to him in the bed.
His hand patted cold, empty sheets.
He realised as the feeling of loss pierced him and his heart sank slowly through the floor that it wasn't just a horrible nightmare.
This memory had become a horrifically repetitive nightly ritual that he couldn't seem to escape.
Harry Ford turned his head and looked out the window of his bedroom, sighing. The silence of his surroundings was deafening, the only noise being his slow and uneven breaths.
He missed her. Everything he saw reminded him of his beloved Eleanor.
Everywhere he looked, he saw her.
When Harry heard a woman giggle, he immediately compared it to the musical laugh of his wife.
When he saw his young teenage daughter’s face, he saw only the likeness to her mother.
When he had a shower, the soapy floral scent was hers.
He remembered the day she bought the hideous neon orange shirt he was wearing, simply because it made her laugh.
He had worn it every day for the past week.
And the one feature shining out of every photograph on the wall, the feature that had attracted him to her so strongly, her unique and stunning electric blue eyes. They cheerily smiled out of every picture, piercing him with loss.
When she had walked out that day, he never suspected it would be the last time he would ever see her alive. If he had walked with her, or told her to drive, then maybe, just maybe she would be here with him today.
But he hadn’t walked with her, and she hadn’t driven. She had walked down to the doctor’s clinic with a hopeful gleam in her electric eyes, excited at the thought of possibly having a second baby.
And then she had been killed by the speeding driver, who was not expecting a pedestrian so early in the day, and whose only concern was that he was half an hour late to work.
Harry had never found out if he was going to have a second child or not. He would never see her beautiful smile or feel her warm embrace for the rest of his bleak, lonely life.
And her eyes, those brilliant blue orbs which he had fallen in love with all those years ago, full of vibrant colour that never faded … those incredible eyes would never open again.
The time was 4am. Harry Ford was tired.
The last thing he saw before he slipped into a numb state of unconsciousness was nothing complicated, nothing terribly sad. It was simply a flash of colour amongst a field of gently swaying daffodils.
Electric blue.