Kafranbel - Bronwen Griffiths
Your voice reverberates though the empty town.
Who do you call for? Friend, lover, brother?
A thousand miles away an owl hoots in the blue of morning trees.
Your voice in the emptiness where children once played and men shuffled cards on the street, where figs now drop to the ground unpicked, and the buildings are the colour of ash. Once this town was green - the green of olives and unripe figs, of spring grass before summer heat descends, the green and tender shoots of a radio station.
The emptiness is a black hole. After the echo of your voice dies there is only silence. No flutter of pigeons’ wings, not the scratching of a cat in the rubble, a dog bark, a car horn; not even the sound of the wind. Nothing remains but grey ash, the wreckage of buildings, shattered dreams, the loneliness of the broken.
An echo is a distinct, reflected sound wave from a surface. The distance travelled by the sound is doubled for echo. For example, if a sound wave takes ten seconds to travel to the bottom of the sea and back, the total distance travelled is 2d, where d is the depth of the sea. Hence, the velocity of the sound for echoes can be calculated by: v=Total distance travelled by soundTime taken=2dtv=Total distance travelled by soundTime taken=2dt.
You call a last time but your voice does not come home to you. It too becomes lost. What returns is the echo of gunfire. First, the muzzle blast. Second, the ballistic shock wave - the crack as the bullet flies through the air, traveling faster than the speed of sound. Third, the bullet piercing flesh. Fourth, the voices of moderation silenced. Fifth, the crying of loved ones left behind. Sixth, the prayers at the graveside. Seventh, the echo of the assassination reverberating around the world, eternally.
The building which housed the radio station has been bombed. No white noise or static; no echo. Just the quietness now.
The owl calls in the morning trees. How blue the light is when the owl calls.
Originally published by Spelk, May 2020
Bronwen Griffiths’s flash fiction and short stories have been published online and in print anthologies, including Atlas & Alice, Bath Flash Fiction, Barren Magazine, Flash Fiction Magazine, Reflex Fiction, Spelk, Trampset, Worthing Flash, 100 Word Flash, Spilling Ink, Flight Journal and others. Her flash fiction has been short-listed (and long-listed) for a number of awards. She has written two novellas-in-flash, one short-listed, and the other long-listed, for the Bath Novella-in-Flash Award. She co-won the Rye News short Story Award in 2023, and recently won the Mslexia Flash Fiction Competition (December 2024)
Her novel, A Bird in the House was published in 2014. Here Casts No Shadow was published in 2018. Her two published collections of flash fiction, Not Here, Not Us, Stories of Syria and Listen with Mother, a Memoir, came out in 2016 and 2019.
