Mystery, Short Story, Word Challenge, Wordle, Writing Prompts

One Last Time

Nancy's Notes 🖊️♬

Written forThe Sunday Wordle;
our host is Brenda Warren and
her prompt words appear below.
A fabulous photo by Crispina Kemp
provided the perfect inspiration.
Here’s where the prompts took me.

shelter, settle, rose, rocks, edge, step,
messy, flesh, left, ghost, scrap, and tremble

© Crispina Kemp

The old church had not held a congregation in two hundred years, but Elliot Gibbons had always found it a reasonable place to settle his thoughts. The walls still stood …. mostly …. their dark rocks mortared together in that ancient flint-and-chalk pattern, pocked with moss and silence. The graveyard beyond the Gothic arch leaned in the grey afternoon light like an audience waiting for something dreadful.

He took one step through the archway and stopped.

She was there, on the far side of the nave, propped against the base of the wall as though she had simply sat down to rest. A single rose …. deep red, almost black at the edges …. lay across her lap. Her coat was left open despite the cold, and what was visible beneath made his stomach drop through the earth.

It was messy. Whoever had done this had not been calm about it.

Elliot began to tremble. Not from fear, he told himself, but from the cold. The wind found every gap in the ruined walls, every edge where stone had crumbled away, and moved through the space like something with purpose. Like a ghost that had not yet learned it was unwelcome.

He crouched. On the grass beside her …. wet, darkening …. was a scrap of cloth torn from a sleeve. Not hers. And caught in the mortar of the wall just above her head, a smear of flesh where a knuckle had scraped stone in the struggle.

Someone had brought her here as a shelter from prying eyes. Someone who knew this place the way Elliot did.

He pulled out his phone, and for a long moment, stared at her face.

Then he put it away.

And he just stayed. In that cold, ruined place, with the wind moving through the gaps. Keeping her company one last time.

NAR©2026
#MLMM
#Wordle

This is “In My Time Of Dying” by Led Zeppelin

Wordle 746
Sunday Picture Post: A Small Suffolk Town

Everything on The Elephant’s Trunk was created by me, unless otherwise indicated. Thanks for your consideration. NAR©2017-present.

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