Short Story

EXAMPLES OF SHORT STORY

The Love Boat

BY: Andy Cliff

The small boat lurched forward precariously. Its three inhabitants lurched too.

“Can’t he keep this thing still?” The disgruntled older woman broke off from her conversation with her daughter.

“Keith!” Megan looked accusingly to her husband, as if the jolt had been caused by him alone, “you know Mother gets upset.”

“There’s precious little I can do about it – tell ‘your mother’ that.”

“Well you might at least try....”

He shrugged and looked away. Conversation restarted without his involvement.

“Well, as I was saying, when I went to the shops on Tuesday, I met Mary no, wait, I’m lying it was Monday morning, it must have been Monday because she’d been cutting the lawn all morning.” The mother was in full flow. “Anyway she was telling me about poor Mrs James at No 22”.

“Isn’t that the woman with the artificial leg?” Megan asked.

“No, no, that’s Anne. Mrs James is the one whose husband died last year. He’d been ill for a long time and suffered terribly, although being married to her for all that time, he must have been used to it. They reckoned in the end that he’d had enough and gave up the ghost just to get away from her”

Keith knew exactly how he’d felt. With “mother” in tow, he’d often felt the same.

The gleeful announcement of his first day off in months had been met with the idea of an outing. The “We could take mother” that followed was less of a suggestion than a decision. No sooner the word, than he was being hectored disconcertedly into the drama.

After what had seemed an eternity of bobbing around, listening to the never-ending cawing of the gannets at the other end of the boat, Keith began to feel an icy chill across his back from the change in direction of the wind, as he pulled slowly on the oars of the rowing boat.

“Well, her son came back from college; from somewhere up north I think, she did tell me, could have been Manchester or was it Bolton? Anyway, he came back and caused...