As she waited to hear back from the hospital she found herself thinking about her brother’s bedroom – magical, mysterious, and strictly off limits unless she knocked and received permission to enter. A rare treat that he gave only when she promised not to ask too many questions….
“Brucie, what’s this?” she asked, fingering a fishhook from the tin box on her brother’s workbench.
“Put it down. If that gets stuck in your thumb, I’ll have to push it all the way through and you’ll cry like a girl.”
She examined the sharp point and barb, then dropped the hook and picked up another one. “What’s it for?”
“Fly fishing.” Her brother set a small hook in the workbench clamp. Taking two scarlet feather fronds from a cardboard container he placed them against the hook and spiraled golden silk thread round and round the ends, flush to the base of the curved steel, transforming the hook into an alluring winged insect.
“Wow, that’s pretty. What do you do with it?”
“You tie it on your rod like this…” Retrieving a spool from his tackle box, Bruce threaded nylon through the fishhook loop, then tied a knot and cut the line in one deft movement. He tossed the hook into the air and flicked the line back and forth. Light from his workbench lamp glinted against the shimmering gold and scarlet.
She forgot it was merely feather and steel and sat mesmerized by the dancing insect that responded to her brother’s hand.
“When this lure strikes the water,” he said, “the trout thinks Supper! He leaps to the surface, gulps the insect, and snap!” Bruce jerked his wrist. “That’s when the fish becomes my supper,” he said with a laugh.
~ * ~
It was the jangling telephone that dragged her back to the here and now. After the call she sat in stunned silence. “He’s gone,” was all her sister could say.
She imagined the neurosurgeon tying silk stitches, closing the hole where the tumor had been. The surgeon’s thread was shimmering gold.
At the corner of her vision, something flickered past the window drawing her attention outside. There an incredibly beautiful, scarlet dragonfly danced in the morning sun.
“Hi Bruce,” she whispered. “How did you do that?”
Brokenpenwriter's Blog 
Lovely little gem of a piece.
Thanks, Carolyn. I hope you are well. I should say I have been missing your sister, but she drops in frequently – and like my brother, always leaves me smiling.
I agree. It’s prose, but almost poetry: condensed, precise, radiant.
wow – praise indeed – thank you so much. I do try these days to remove any words or phrases that don’t serve the story and find nouns and verbs that eliminate need for description. But tis hard to do… so I keep trying. Many thanks for your encouragement.
Thank you, I am intrigued by your writing! I read the first line of the first post that I clicked on, on your blog and had to follow!
Succinct and powerful. I have to admit that since I’m so used to reading creative essays, I thought that this was a work of nonfiction. But forceful all the same, and this story is sure to lodge in my memory.
I wanted to thank you, Cindy, for the support you’ve voiced for my writing. But I’ve decided it’s time to move on to other pursuits, so I’m going to be closing my blog and leaving the blogosphere at the end of the month.
I wish you luck in your pursuits.
Thank you for your kind words, and yes you were right – this story is one of nonfiction, and the brother is as real as you or me, as is the memory of silk, gold and scarlet. Bless you and be well. I have written on your blog.
For those who are interested, I struggled with how to categorize this – fiction or nonfiction, and I had to settle on both. The story reaches a conclusion that is my truth yet perhaps not my brother’s. We all see into and beyond facts through different lens, so I allow the story to speak for itself, whether biographical, nonfiction or no – it doesn’t really matter if the reader finds their own truth – an aspect of their self.