Short Story: A Winter Vignette

A Winter Vignette

The park was a patch of lawn fenced in by black iron railings and a privet hedge. It was a green oasis sandwiched between three rows of mews houses in a quiet housing estate. The people who lived there were mostly childless, so few kids at play disturbed the neat rows of chrysanthemums, carnations and hollyhocks.

Every morning, the girl in the window used to crank up her recliner bed. She would get into the wheelchair parked by her bedside and wheel herself to the big bay window at the end of her bedroom. The park below was as desolate as a cemetery in the pale fog of a cold December morning.

At 7 o’clock sharp, the man from the Central Reserve Police Force wheeled his battered old bicycle down the gravel path from the main gate. On this morning, like so many others, he propped his locked bike against a tree and went into the gardener’s shed. The policeman came out a few minutes later, wearing a tracksuit with the letters CRPF stenciled on the back, instead of his khaki winter uniform. The watcher in the window had nicknamed him “Creampuff” after the letters, but he wasn’t soft or round.

Charlie Oddbody – the name she’d given him – ambled in around five minutes later, just as Creampuff finished his stretching exercises. Oddbody was like a car built from parts that didn’t quite match. He had skinny, spindly arms, a pot belly, long muscular legs and enormous feet. A cast in one eye made his bony face look even more weird and his big jug ears stuck out like satellite dishes.

Without bothering with preliminary warm-up exercises, Charlie ran three rounds of the park, arms and legs jerking crazily. His breath whistled out of his bulbous nose in small fluffy clouds that floated for some time in the cold air. She imagined SNEE-WHEE tea-kettle noises and smiled. Sometimes, when Charlie ran, he seemed to fly, leaping the flowerbeds in a single bound. At other times, he seemed to be dancing. Creampuff ran five laps to Charlie’s three, more easily and with less effort.

She envied the runners below the use of their legs. She often wondered whether they could see what she saw reflected every morning in the glass panes of her window. A small pointed face with large hazel eyes, framed by shiny dark hair.

The girl in the high window shivered, even with the woolen shawl draped over her flannel nightgown. She’d seen Charlie once while being wheeled through the streets in the late afternoon. Apart from a fleeting glance, he hadn’t looked at her again as he strolled past.

Across the park, a small boy peeped over the sill of his open window and between the stalks of the crocus flowers growing in the window box. He was patiently waiting for the watcher to open her window. After some time, she did.

The boy held up his left hand. It was holding a home-made model aircraft gripped firmly between the thumb and first two fingers.  He aimed carefully, right eye shut. A quick flick of his wrist sent the model glider flying out.

The small aircraft soared high above Charlie and Creampuff. Just when it seemed it would turn away from her window, a wing dipped and the model plane whooshed in past her to land hard on the floor.

The girl turned her wheelchair around and started wheeling herself towards the crashed balsa wood glider. The cold, slippery floor made braking difficult and the left wheel ran over the little model plane. She bent down carefully and picked up the smashed wreck.

There was a simple message handwritten across the cracked wings: “GET WELL SOON”. If only…

The girl looked back over her shoulder and saw the boy in the house across the park waving. She waved back too.