Flash! Friday: Prompt #3-11

Technically, my entry to this week's Flash! Friday Fiction contest was a bit late, and therefore doesn't qualify, but since I wrote it (rather hastily), I thought I'd share.

This week's prompt required a 200-word story (+/- 10) incorporating this setting:

and inspired by this photo:

To the Moon and Back

My bags are packed. Frayed at the edges, the suitcases stacked easily on the porch we’ll soon leave behind. Our home on Hope Street, or so you named it. Five years we lived here together, if the machines can be believed, but I never counted the days, swept away in the novelty, the adventure. In our love.

The promises you whispered became the cobblestones beneath my feet as I walk the craggy surface of the moon. Stars and satellites shine in the endless sky. I search it every night, though night and day have meaning only in my mind, defined by the relentless ticking of the clock beside our stove.

Three hundred and eighty days I’ve marked off on a makeshift calendar. Three hundred and eighty nights, that I’ve spent staring, praying, hating you, and hoping.

You told me twenty-four. Thirty at the most. Less than a month. You’ll hardly miss me! You laughed as I hugged you close.

Three hundred and fifty days you owe me, as I wait for the ship you set off to find — our next adventure in another corner of the universe.

My bags are packed.

(191 words)