Fate

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Let me read it to you

Samantha was standing in the churchyard. In a grey coat and grey woolly hat she was hardly noticeable amongst the sombre gravestones which leaned drunkenly from long forgotten final resting places. There weren’t many mourners, maybe half a dozen, wrapped in black and standing in silence around a freshly dug cavity in the ground. There was to have been a wedding at the church today. It was cancelled.

She wished she could have turned back time.

*

It was one morning a couple of weeks ago and Samantha was on a bus on her way home from a shopping expedition. She’d been sitting next to a lady she knew by sight; she lived next door to her parents and they had often waved to each other when Samantha was visiting. They got talking and said how surprising it was that they’d never met properly in the past. Mary her name was. She’d been shopping for a new outfit to wear at her daughter’s wedding. She opened her bag a little, and pulled out a corner of the dress: it was the most beautiful pink.

It was raining; not much, more of a fine drizzle. Normally Samantha jumped off at the bottom of the hill and walked through the park to her house, but she was tempted to stay on for one stop longer and take a quicker route home rather than get too wet. She couldn’t make up her mind and Mary laughed at her indecisiveness. The bus stopped and several people filed off. Samantha decided to give the park a miss! She was the only passenger to get off at the next stop, and the driver made it clear by his mumblings that he’d rather have kept going and made it through the traffic light up ahead which was green. It changed to red as he pulled away. As she walked along the path she caught sight of the driver sitting at the lights with his elbows on the steering wheel, his hands propping up his head!  She couldn’t stop a little smile!

Later that evening Samantha was chatting to her father on the phone. He told her how shocked he and her mother were to hear that their neighbour Mary had been knocked down by a car which mounted the pavement just after she left the bus that morning. There was nothing the paramedics could do for her.

*

Samantha watched as a young couple threw rose petals into the open grave. Today, they should have been showered with petals.

                            *

If that fateful morning Samantha had left the bus at her usual stop and walked through the park to her home, the driver would not have had to wait for several minutes at the red light. By the time the car mounted the pavement, the bus would have been long gone and Mary would have been turning the key in the lock of her door. And today Mary would be the proud mother in the beautiful pink dress that she’d shown to Samantha on the bus.

She wished she could have turned back time.

Written for Writers Island and loosely based on the prompt 'Time Travel'

New Carry On Tuesday prompt waiting for you HERE!