Birthday Retreat – A WWBH post

The Writer Wednesday Blog Hop is a weekly challenge to compose a piece of flash fiction in 500 words or less.

Every Wednesday there is one picture and five random words, all of which are to be used in the story, and the deadline is the following Tuesday.

The co-hosts of this challenge are Carrie Sorenson, Tena Carr, Nicole Pyles and Leanne Sype.

This weeks picture:

This weeks words:          Custard, cord, birthday, alter, myth

This weeks story:

Birthday Retreat

The sun reflected off the water, dazzling to the eyes. Sitting back in his recliner, Marcus raised his glass in the air. ‘Happy birthday to me!’ he called out, but there was nobody within miles to hear him. Which was just the way he liked it.

He’d lost count of how many days he’d been on the beach, but he wasn’t worried. He had faith in his survival skills, and fully expected to be rescued before too long. He wasn’t looking forward to it, the whole point of being here was to get away from everyone and everything. The one day that he should really be able to spend truly on his own if he chose to, should be his own birthday. He knew Vera would have planned something extravagant and unnecessary to celebrate, and it was never really for him anyway, just another way for her to show off in front of her friends.

He wasn’t sure if he could really say he was stranded, it probably didn’t qualify if it was self-inflicted, especially as he still had the boat that he arrived in. He’d checked on it again that morning, just to make sure it was still there, and he felt better knowing it was still bobbing up and down in it’s shallow pool, attached firmly to a tree by cord.

Staring out towards the horizon, he could only imagine the fuss being made in his absence. His wife would be alternating between worry that he was missing and stress that the arrangements weren’t perfect. He was definitely better off here, away from the balloons and cake, the ice-cream, apple pie and custard. All he needed was his beer, his beach and his boat.

He’d had the same thing to deal with at his last big birthday bash, which was the first time he came up with the idea of a hideaway. Needless to say, Vera had been less than impressed and forbid him from ever going offshore on his own again. The old cliché about ‘life starting at 40’ was a myth he knew would never be true. All it had done for him was to find his life even more dominated and controlled because of a fear of relapse. It wasn’t even his fear, but everyone else’s. He had full faith in his heart, even if the doctors didn’t, and expected to return to their disapproving faces in a day or two. He just needed some more time. He could go back whenever he wanted.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

‘I’m sorry Mrs Leonard, there’s nothing we can do.’

‘But, there must be,’ she said, holding back the tears. ‘It’s his birthday, he can’t leave me like this on his birthday.’

‘He’s been in a coma for four days now,’ the doctor continued, ‘if he was going to return to us, he would have. Just be content to know he hasn’t suffered, wherever his mind has been, he was happy.’

Word count: 495