Reblogged from Sally Cronin’s Smorgasbord:

Three Sisters (Part One) by Paul Andruss

* 1 *

‘Jenny isn’t it?’

Jenny spun round, staring blankly at the tiny old woman wrapped up against the cold.

‘Yes. Hello’, she replied, wondering who the hell it was.

‘You don’t remember me.’

No, I’m… Are you? She floundered. It couldn’t be. She’d have to be a hundred by now. But she looked exactly the same: the white hair carelessly tucked beneath the old felt hat and those sharp eyes, bright as buttons, in a web of wrinkles. ‘Mrs Partridge?’

‘And how are you, dear?’ the old lady’s voice dropped. ‘It must have been terrible.’

Jenny gave a brittle smile thinking she would kill Sally. This was the last thing she needed: a week of total strangers telling her they were sorry. ‘I’m feeling lot better thank you.’

But she wasn’t. It was hard to face it again in the middle of an empty windswept street. Just when she thought she had heard every possible expression of sympathy, something like this came out of the blue leaving it all raw. She felt tears start and laughed stupidly. ‘I’d forgotten about that wind. It’s biting. Do you ever get used to it?’

‘I never feel it.’

Maybe you didn’t when you’d been here as long as she had, thought Jenny; remembering how her mother hated the winter wind. She swore it brought the snow down off the Three Sisters. Jenny looked for the towering peaks, but they were lost in thick low cloud.

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