Note: I don’t have a picture for this one, and I’m not sure quite how many words it is, because I wrote it on my phone this morning, but gosh darn it! I still did a flash story this week! 😂
The Eclair
A flash story by Maggie Slater
Evelyn had dreamed of eating Parisian eclairs at a bistro ever since she was six years old, and now that she had one, she couldn’t do it. Its lacquer black chocolate stripe made her think of ancient chests filled with dust and scrolls and secrets. It’s beautifully rounded pastry shell looked as of it had been laminated with hope itself, and not just ordinary butter.
For an hour after she finished her coffee, it sat on the plate before her, untouched. The waiter came by several times and asked her something in French that sounded nothing like what she’d studied in high school or independently in the year since her retirement and subsequent divorce. She smiled at him, paid her bill, and nestling the eclair in a nest of tissues from her purse, she took it back to her rented apartment.
In the three weeks of her stay, she had done all the things she’d always dreamed of doing in Paris. The Louvre was much less impressive and much more crowded than it had been in her imagination. Norte Dame, a bit smaller. But the old cobbled rues lined with trees and the Arc de Triumph were lovely enough, she felt by the end of her visit that all in all, it had been worth it.
But she still hadn’t eaten the eclair. She’d put it in a white cardboard box she’d gotten from a little jewelry shop, and it sat undisturbed among tissue paper on the top shelf of the tiny apartment fridge. When she had packed all her other things—the clothes she’d bought especially to wear in Paris to seem like a local and not a tourist, the books in French she’d picked up from a street vendor along the Seine, the handful of mementos and knickknacks to remind her of this long-awaited and much-earned reward to herself—she took the box from the fridge and looked at the eclair.
She wouldn’t be able to take it on the plane, she knew. If she put it in her suitcase, it would certainly be crushed. She had to eat it now, or throw it away.
The lacquered chocolate had lost its luster. Beads of sweat pearled along its surface in the humid air. The pastry sagged like tired skin.
Evelyn lifted the eclair from its tissue bed, only to find it had grown tacky, cleaving to the moist paper. Try as she might, she couldn’t pick it all off. The chocolate smeared her fingers. She tried to hold back tears.
Her phone buzzed frantically: her ride to the airport, waiting on the street, no doubt.
The pastry split across her palms, oozing custard in a clump down her wrist, dropping a glob onto her white linen pants she’d bought at a boutique just down the street.
Too late, she thought, as the saturated pastry skin sloughed to the floor.
Too late, she thought as chocolate smeared across her empty hands, mangled with torn tissue paper.
Too late, she thought as her phone rang and rang, eager to drag her back home.
Note: There’s usually some info about me or my ko-fi if you enjoyed the story and would like to buy me a coffee (or an eclair!), but on my phone I’m limited! Feel free to poke around the site to learn more if you’re so inclined! Thanks for reading!