Sunday's Whirligig #95

For this week's blog hop Sunday's Whirligig #95 I've written a piece of flash fiction.  Click the link to see what some of the other writers have written for this challenge of using as many of the 12 words given and in what ever form and genre they wish.

This week's words come from "Boy Breaking Glass" by Gwendolyn Brooks:  broken, create, pepper, plank, revenge, music, longer, mistake, cliff, loneliness, everything, snare.

Just in Time

"Don't do it," they said, but she barely heard their words as she crossed over the old and rotting, mossy plank someone had placed from one side of the stream to the other.  Her iPod was playing one of her favorite songs that she was hoping would eliminate the loneliness she was feeling.  Sometimes music helped to change her moods and get her out of her slumps, but she had never felt this bad, ever!"

The group of friends, if you could call them that, shrugged their shoulders and walked on.  "Just let her go.  She wants to be alone.  Can't really blame her after everything that has happened.  It was probably a mistake to bring her with us."

She wasn't familiar with this part of the forest, but she didn't plan to go very far.  She walked up a steep trail, probably made by some deer, until she reached the top of a cliff that overlooked the beach far below.  She sat down on a log to rest, but her thoughts began to wander instead of finding joy in the beautiful scene below.  "I wish I could just forget how mean they were to him, but they just kept peppering him with cruel words and actions everyday, for months.  She had wanted to take revenge to make them stop, but her parents thought it best for her younger brother to learn to defend himself and for her to stay out of it.

Finally there was one day when some of the boys decided they would create a snare for him when he was planning to go fishing down at the pond.  Her brother thought they were finally being nice to him when they invited him to go around to the far side of the pond with them.  He knew that if he went with them he would be gone longer than what he'd told his parents, but he thought they would be glad that he was finally making friends with these guys.

Hours later, he hadn't returned home, and she and her parents were nearly frantic.  They decided to go down to the pond together and find him.  She had been the one to find him there among the reeds below a log that extended out over the pond.  When the full story was finally known, her heart nearly broke.

"Life was just not going to ever be the same without him," she thought as she looked over the edge of the cliff one final time.  Then she heard her friend's coming up the trail when they called, "Hey, we were worried about you!  Come along with us.  Let's go get some pizza at that place we passed on the way here."