The Wiped Away World

Flash Fiction on a Tuesday and a break from the poetic…

One of the few remaining windmills in Montmartre. During the revolution, Montrmartre was outside the city walls and was a rural, Windmill covered place. It was also a place of great piety and it is not impossible to conceive that daughters of aristocratic families were forced to flee during the revolution when the convents were dispersed in the midst of “The Terror”

 

The sails of the windmill turned and, Marie, crouching behind the flour sacks, waited.

The cries beyond the mill’s walls had gradually stilled, leaving only the “shhhhh!” of the great millstone as it ground the abandoned wheat into powder.

The air was a rolling cloud of all enveloping white. Marie’s pink silk gown turned white, her porcelain skin turned white, but not her face; terror had made all colour flee long before this.

“But why Mamma and Pappa?” the question repeated in her brain. They had always been kind to the servants. Mamma herself would tend to the needs of the poor with generous gifts and the peasants seemed so happy in the countryside around their Chateau.

But suddenly, in a moment, the world had upended itself. Kind Pappa and Mamma became despised “Aristos” and the screaming mob had torn all society down.

And now Pappa and Mamma were on a tumbril heading for the guillotine and Marie was hiding in a mill, a strange ghost of a time past, lost in a new world.

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