A 300-word story : The Parallelogram of Forces
More views of – or before – Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
The Parallelogram of Forces
For Roland*
Her nippy little Jetta (nippy beyond its years since registration) shunted him before he could think to do anything.
Yes, he could see her coming, once a proper chance to look had made him stop. However, that just tensed him on the wheel, giving him whiplash (alongside, from the belt, the injury to his shoulder). What was almost worse (well, he did not feel those things at the time – their way is to come to-morrow) was that horribly familiar, if infrequent, sound that car makes on car.
They surveyed the bits that now constituted the nearside light-assembly, and the nigh-padlocked box of his boot. Somehow, physics, and The Parallelogram of Forces, had been far kinder to her Jetta than his now damp squib of a Fiesta.
She did not remember her insurers, or have her policy. Of course, she readily agreed that he needed to know : much more readily – even if it was a momentary and anxious hesitation, suggesting the suspicion that he had ‘designs’ – than part with her phone number, which he wrote on his certificate.
As he drove away (thankfully, he could get to that appointment still, albeit late), he strongly felt she was the sort of woman who appealed to a man like him. When he called (after a few days, not to seem eager – he had learnt that much), he found she was not exactly local, but it was kind of her to offer dinner, and…
When she died, just three years on (and in childbirth), he found that she had decided to preserve, behind her chest of drawers, a handful of neat notes on yellow A5.
As he read them, they made sense of a pair of luggage-labels : her return flight from Malta, his that had been missing when he landed from Berlin.
End-notes
* Who wisely leaves to others what they can do best.
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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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