Flash! Friday – Vol 2 – 16

Prompt: http://flashfriday.wordpress.com/2014/03/28/flash-friday-vol-2-16/
Sailing Away with Charon of the Stars

The sun was low and fat in the sky, and Paul pedaled as fast as he could along the river, knowing that once it set, he’d be in for a whipping at home. But home lay to the south, and he was riding north.

His right arm was numb from the shoulder down, and getting through the day at school without alerting the nurse had been a nightmare. Thankfully, they weren’t doing wrestling anymore in gym.

The overpass was really too far for him to ride at his age, but the man he’d met had told him to be there by sundown, and he wasn’t the sort to wait. Paul didn’t look forward to seeing the grin on the man’s face when he promised him that on his world, all mommies loved their children had given him nightmares, again, but anything was better than that empty place at the dinner table or the shadows where his sister had once lived.

VisDare 54: Covert

Prompt: http://anonymouslegacy1.wordpress.com/2014/03/25/visdare-54-covert/

Lord Reginald the Fraudulent stepped out of his solicitor’s offices onto Pembroke circle and into a slushy puddle left by a semi-attentive street sweeper. His socks soaked instantly – the holes in the bottom of his shoes were growing and multiplying, and he feared what would happen when he could no longer contrive of ways to keep them from falling apart entirely.

The snow was wet and heavy, and Reggie pulled his coat up higher over his face. It was a nice coat, made of the finest wool, hand stitched by the finest tailors on this side of the English Channel. It was warm and luxurious, and none of the men at any of the clubs at which Reg used to hold a membership wore better. But it was also the last item of quality he owned, and if his solicitor was correct, soon to become nothing more than a memory.

MWBB – week 52 – the First Anniversary

Prompt: http://thetsuruokafiles.wordpress.com/2014/03/11/mid-week-blues-buster-week-52

Once upon a time, there lived an angel. Not the kind of angel as the form good people take upon entering the afterlife, but a luminous being whose existence transcended all definition. She revealed herself to me, Maylinn did, after a night of bliss in each other’s arms. She told me of places that had lived in nothing but stories and songs until she wished them into existence, and then she told me that she loved me.

That was when I knew I had to leave her. She would never leave me, not Maylinn, not the angel of uncountably infinite worlds, not the woman who believed that all things were not just possible, but actually happened. I knew what she wanted to hear from me, so I said it, but I was incapable of love. My makers hadn’t added that to the mix during my creation, for what need had I for love?

Once upon a time, there lived a golem.

I was not merely from this Earth, I was of it, and I was an anchor. On another world, in another reality, I would have no more substance than a dream. She was born to create realities. I was made as a living avatar of one. I would destroy her, or she would destroy me.

But how do you leave someone who can go anywhere? Anyplace I found to hide, she could create.  There was only one answer.

“Show me. Show me a new world, one made just for the two of us.”

She giggled, then kissed my nose. “I wanted you to ask me that so badly. At night, alone, I would dream of our place, and I’d lose my ability to breathe – just for a moment – and I’d imagine you there with me.

“Close your eyes, my love.”

I kissed her again, and then did as I’d been bidden. There was no love for me, but what better image was there to take into the eternal void than her smile? I felt her fingers dancing around my face, heard her whispering words that had no meaning, and I awaited the end.

The way was long, and I fell into a dream. In the dream there was nothing, not even me, and then there was something. Maylinn, although not as I knew her, but as she truly was.

“I know, my love. I know who you are, I know what you are, I know who made you. Did you think that I could not envision a world where you were more than the sum of your parts? Open your eyes, and awaken.”

Once upon a time, there lived an angel who made it possible for a golem to love.

Flash Frenzy, week 10

Prompt: http://theangryhourglass.wordpress.com/2014/03/08/flash-frenzy-round-10/

This is where Jurgen had been killed, his bullet-ridden body left as a reminder to anyone with dreams of escaping to the West that communism might be a failure when it came to bringing food and medicine to the people of the state, but it was efficient at killing those it couldn’t feed. He’d laid there a full week before the soldiers didn’t want to put up with the stink and the flies, and because the wall was on the approved route I took to the factory each day, I was forced to witness the decay of my only son in real time.

What would he have thought, I wondered often, of the changes which took place only months later. Every war starts with someone being killed, and there’s always some last life sacrificed to the capriciousness of fate, a death that doesn’t change anything but the last digit in history’s book of casualties. Jurgen had dreamed often of impossible things, but the future had failed him.

I ran my fingers over the rough stone, the concrete and rebar covered with graffiti instead of blood, and thought of the walls which still stood, replacing the physical barrier with many more that lived in our minds. The world was more divided now than it had been in those grey days, the hope of a better life a chimera, staying ever out of our grasp, taunting us with impossible dreams. I didn’t know what Jurgen would have thought of the fall of the wall, but his heart would have broken watching history repeat itself.

Mine had been broken a quarter-century ago, and no matter what I tried, there was nothing for it. I’d pretended for so long that I was living for him, living for his hope, living to realize his dreams, that there was nothing left. Nothing of him. Nothing of me. There was no faceless 20 year old holding a rifle, shouting at me to stop, but my end would come here, in the same spot as his. My hand didn’t tremble as I drew the gun from my pocket. There was no point. No regret. No future.

VisDare 51: Carefree

Prompt: http://anonymouslegacy1.wordpress.com/2014/03/05/visdare-51-carefree/

Thursday, May 17, 2018, was Emily’s most perfect day. It was the day she had wished for since she was a little girl, where nothing ever went wrong for her and everyone she loved was still alive and Duran Duran were coming over to her house to play a private concert just for her and all of her friends. It was seventy-five degrees at noon, not a cloud to be seen, and she was rolling down the road south of town on her grandmother’s old bike – feet not even touching the pedals as she laughed and called out to Debra, her next-door-neighbor and BFF who’d been killed by a drunk driver when they were twelve. So perfect was this day that her brain didn’t even wonder where the magic had come from or dread losing all that she loved a second time. Not, that is, until the clock struck midnight.

Mid Week Blues Buster, week 51

Prompt: http://thetsuruokafiles.wordpress.com/2014/03/04/mid-week-blues-buster-week-51/

I dreaded birthdays, especially the part where I had to pretend like I didn’t hate myself or, really, everyone else, long enough to listen to off-key renditions of ‘Happy Birthday’ and eat crappy Wal-Mart cake and open presents that showed that, once again, no one I knew had even the vaguest understanding of who I was or what I liked. But it was even more work to fend off the advances of the zombie hordes of family members and coworkers and the odd passer-by than it was to endure the socialization, get it over with, and find my way back to the only place in the world that made sense to me.

My sister tried hard, no one could deny that. She bought more and more gifts each year, determined to find something that struck a chord with me, but I didn’t want the new hot album. Or tickets to a movie. Or fashionable clothes. Or, as she did for my thirtieth last year – a trip to Tokyo. Tokyo. Me. As if I didn’t have enough trouble avoiding people in stinking Tacoma, she wanted me to hang around with, what, a hundred million people crammed into a city the size of a phone booth?

It took six months for her to speak to me again, and that was just “your car is parked behind mine” when I was enduring Thanksgiving. I shuddered at the thought of the confrontation we’d have this year. I almost didn’t go.

Most of the family had learned a lesson from last year, and stuck to the simple things. Gift cards. Cash. Far Side birthday cards bought at Target on the way to the restaurant. But Annie, she still had a box. Not even wrapped, a box from some internet catalog company. The table grew silent as I slipped my finger through the tape and popped it open. Clothing, obviously, but nothing fashionable – no sweaters or khakis or loafers. Just a plain brown t-shirt with the words “I do whatever the voices in my head tell me to do” printed on it.

I looked at Annie, and for the first time in years, I smiled at a gift. She smiled back, sweet, innocent, her hopes answered. I knew what she wanted, and I drew her in for a hug. That was when I decided I’d save her for last. The voices didn’t come from inside my head, I knew that now, and the things under the bed would have the most wonderful time watching me devour her brains.

Flash Friday, vol 2, week 13

Prompt: http://flashfriday.wordpress.com/2014/03/07/flash-friday-vol-2-13/

To the Victors

Marie could tell from the knock at the door that Henri was as weary as she was. He usually made one delivery each week, but this was the seventh today. Even so, she was shocked at what opening the door revealed. Henri was sitting, exhausted, on a large milk jug, with twenty – no, thirty – others strewn around the porch. One was balanced precariously on the edge, and as they watched with more detachment than either would have ever imagined possible, it slowly toppled over, landing with a soft splat in the garden. She thought of the years they’d suffered through, where even a drop of the life-giving liquid was considered precious, and now neither of them bothered to move to prevent gallons of blood from fertilizing her azaleas. The cannons fired again, and Henri looked up in dismay.

“Leave it be, love. They can’t stop killing each other, the humans, and there’ll be plenty of blood left tomorrow.”