Tag: Flash fiction

Three Suns Eve

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“Thalia!” Her little brother’s high pitched shriek penetrated the thick timber walls even with the doors almost entirely closed. “Thalia, Mama says thirdmeal will be ready in three clicks.”

Eben threw the door wide and stood panting in the sudden light. “Eben, please!” Thalia shaded her eyes with one hand and fanned herself with her thick brush broom. “It’s Three Suns Eve!”

The boy carefully pulled the door closed and perched on the ladder. “When will we go below?”

“At Sister Dawn, Eben. You know that.” She returned to her sweeping; any stray debris from the windowing would destroy the hydraulics and trap them on the surface under the suns. “We honor the coming of the Sisters’ fire with an offering of song and crystal. The spirits of the Sisters fill the crystals, and in their rainbow light we raise the shields and descend.”

“And then we party!” Eben jumped off the ladder right into the middle of her pile, scattering chaff. He ducked his head with a sheepish grin at Thalia’s glare.

“Oh, nevermind,” she groaned. “I’m almost done anyway. Tell Mama I may be a little late for thirdmeal; I want to oil and dress before eating. It wouldn’t do to be unprepared for my first Sister Dawn joining.”

He rolled his eyes. “You’re just like Dada. Who cares about robes and ceremonies?”

She laughed and smacked his britches with her broom. “Scat! You’ll feast soon enough. Let me finish or there won’t be ceremony or party.”

The House

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She trailed her fingers along the wooden bannister, stepping carefully to avoid tripping over the litter of decay. The air smelled faintly musty, but the open front door lit up the foyer with clear sunlight. She turned and grinned at her companions.

Chuck groaned. “I know that look,” he told the real estate agent with a dramatic droop. “Honey, did you have to pick the dump?”

“Don’t call it a dump!” she pleaded, laughing. “Look at the lines; it’s a beautiful old house!” She gestured to the agent standing just inside the door. “Tell him how special it is.”

“A historical gem, really,” the woman agreed in a tone just a little too bright. “A bit closed off for modern tastes, of course, but a few walls could easily be removed.” She stepped gingerly over scattered glass from a broken window, forgetting to hide a grimace.

Honey followed her, peering into the dim interior of the front room. “Look, Chuck, there’s a fireplace! Oh, let’s go upstairs; I bet every room has one!”

He sighed but let her take his hand and pull him up the creaking steps. “Central heating was invented for a reason, Honey. Do you intend to have a fire in the baby’s room? And it’s gonna take a fortune to fix everything wrong with this place!”

She squealed with delight from two steps above him. “Look at the wood floors, babe! Can’t you just see them all polished up?”

He looked back at the agent once again waiting at the front door. “Are you sure there are no ghosts in this old place?” he asked with a rye grin.

She clicked her pen and opened a notebook, standing a little straighter than she already was. “Shall we start the paperwork now?”

Moon

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She sniffed the night air, savoring the smells of grass and dead leaves surrounding her den. A screech overhead drew her gaze, but the owl’s presence woke no concern in her yet.

A musky scent set her body trembling, and her mate trotted out of the underbrush. He sat just out of reach, tongue lolling from his mouth, waiting. She heaved her swollen belly up and attempted to gambol around him playfully, managing little more than a waddle. He licked her nose and trotted back into the underbrush.

She followed him, panting with the effort. It would be the last hunt together under the moon for many weeks. The cubs would be born before another night arrived. A scratching in the leaves behind her stopped her in her tracks, and she locked her chops as her mate crouched.

Impossible

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

That’s how she knew she had stepped through. Thirteen hours on the clock. The impossible hour. Her breath froze and shattered as another puff left her nostrils. Humans weren’t meant to be here. Well, here wasn’t exactly the right word. Weren’t meant to be… now? Whatever; she needed to get her proof and find a way out before it was too late.

Her fingers, already growing numb, fumbled with the lens cover on her camera. Impossibly, the camera felt warm; maybe it wasn’t the day that was cold after all. She gripped the thing firmly and turned in a slow circle,eyes squinting into the too bright sky.

A – creature – stared at her unblinking from twenty feet away. She thought it wasn’t blinking; she couldn’t seem to focus on it properly. As if it wasn’t quite, well, possible. And it was sort of sitting in mid air, which was really beginning to wig her out. She hastily raised the camera and pressed the button.

The creature squawked and vanished at the same time that the camera disintegrated in a loud black rumbling puff. The clock face cracked and the hands spun out of control. Ice crept up from the ground, locking her in place, and her scream was a silent crystal shooting from her nerveless mouth.

Cursed City

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Fifteen years since she had fled the city, a child in a handful of refugees with nothing to feel but pain. Child or not, that last view of the city had been burned into her memory as surely as the real fires had marked her face. She frowned, old scars pulling tight; surely it should look different by now.

The burned out buildings shot twisted iron fingers toward the sky, and the asphalt beneath her feet had melted and cooled into a strange, urban desert floor. The ruins were earily silent, the cracked walls devoid of even the smallest sign of life. She shivered, glancing back at the overgrown countryside, and faltered. The boundary was too clean, too clear.

It had been a mistake to come here; they had warned her, but she had been so sure of herself. Fire leaped suddenly around her, crackling, roaring angrily. The scent of smoke choked her airway, and her coughs joined disembodied screams and shouts that assaulted her from every direction. Despite the flames, her hands numbed with cold, and every cough spewed white mist from her lungs.

Just as suddenly the ruins were empty again beneath the blazing August sun. She turned and fled.

Market Day

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Shara peered through the nearest window as she worked the complicated controls. Jumping onto the long crank shaft to add her full weight to the effort, she grumbled under her breath. The thing creaked louder than a banshee shriek, and moved about as fast as old Piet dozing in his armchair. She heaved a sigh of relief when the shaft suddenly dropped and a thudding jolt confirmed a successful landing.

“Cam! Jolie! Are the booths packed?” She hurried into the other room, pulling her carefully brushed market coat over her shoulders. Her siblings waited near the door, the double tongues of their rolling booths locked into their hip implants.

Cam grimaced from his cycle. “We’re ready, but one of my gears has a nick in it. Makes the tongue jump. My hip is already sore just cycling in here from the storeroom.”

Shara grimaced. The twins shouldn’t even be cycling heavy machinery yet, but since Piet had weakened and Mam succumbed to cloud sickness, there was no one else. “We’ll just have to make enough to replace it today.” So much for fixing the crank shaft.

She stuffed the leather pouch holding their permits and a few stray chits into her coat and locked her own booth into her sockets. “Watch out for dracs; the young ones can survive above the miasma for a while, and sometimes even make it up here over the cloud line. We don’t need radiation burns on top of everything else.”

The Row

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The Grand Experiment, the village council called it. Marigold sniffed; Mayor Belfast always did tend toward the dramatic. Bunch of nonsense, in her opinion. What folk were thinking electing that bunch of nincompoops she would never know.

Six months they had wasted building the stupid things. A whole row of cottages made entirely of turf. Except the hare-brained idiots hadn’t been able to figure out how to hold up a roof made of dirt, so modern eaves of  wood painted black stuck out like a sore thumb. Glass windows had been the next logical step, but only in the wooden sections. That looked well! She rolled her eyes.

The entire town had come out for the unveiling; the result had been underwhelming. Marigold really didn’t know what that sorry excuse for a mayor had expected, trying to talk up walls and floors made of dirt like they were the golden streets themselves. The tour had been a disaster from start to finish. The only person remotely interested in living in one of those fake caves was crazy old Miss Hartskell. The council had finally been forced to accept her application to recoup the cost to the town.

Since then that batty old witch had taken over the row with strays, plants, and incomprehensible handicrafts. No one bothered to argue; it wasn’t like the cottages were in demand. And even Marigold had to admit that from the main road they looked like pretty green hills nestled in an old Grove. Too bad she had to pass it on her way to work at the town hall every day.

“Rain before noon, Marigold!” Marj Hartskell waved delighted lyrics as she delivered her forecast through a cascade of tumbled curls. “Morning, Marj,” Marigold called back through the open car window. Potty old hag. “See you at tea time as usual. For goodness sake, don’t bring any wildlife!”

The Glass House

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It was a house like every other. Brick walls, stone trimmings, wooden doors, and shingles roof. At least, that what everyone saw during the day. A nice, ordinary dwelling, if a little old-fashioned and pretentious.

The moon told a different story. Bricks and boards gleamed, reflecting the soft rays with a greenish light that could only come from glass. As the moon rose higher, the house transformed, seemingly a thing of crystal. Though glass, the faceted brick revealed nothing inside. Shadows melded with shifting light in a nocturnal dance, seen only by the rare soul unable to sleep and out for a midnight constitutional.

Such walkers avoided the gleaming property, spooked by its ghostly appearance. None of them would ever have noticed that one shadow moved differently. As far as they knew, no one had set foot in the mansion for a century except for a daily woman, hired to clean, and a caretaker who visited one day a week for maintenance. The servants were frequently plied with questions over a friendly ale at the local pub, but to no purpose.

Only in the moonlight did that independent shadow flit across windowpanes, or pass through green-hued doors of carved glass to pace restlessly on the manicured drive. Silent, it would retreat with the stars into its daily disguise, invisible, waiting.

Water of Life

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Hera’s hands rested on her trembling knees, breath coming in deep gasps. The bowl perched on a rock nearby, but her head swam, threatening to make her black out. She knew why the Wise Ones required this journey. She did know. But the sick trying to force its way up her throat questioned.

The bowl was old, older than even the oldest Wise One. And ugly. Hera thought it looked like a rotten orange, which churned her stomach even more. It had been found long ago by a boy on the cusp of manhood, drunk from out of need and carried home out of curiosity. Not until the boy failed to age for years after did the ancestors learn its nature. And its danger.

So many had died for the bowl in those days. So many twisted by its gift, a curse to the undeserving. So those who were left set it here, to be retrieved only by one with great strength of character. At the coming of age, every boy and girl set out to climb the mountain between sun up and sun down. Once up for the bowl, once down to drink, then back up to replace the bowl. Few succeeded.

Everyone believed Hera would fail. The smallest and weakest of those born in her name year, she stood small chance at physical prowess. She smiled at the secret she knew. To use the bowl, strength of will mattered most. She stood on the mountain, where many turned back too soon.

She forced a deep, ragged breath and reached for the bowl. With the first step down her legs threatened to give way, but she took another step anyway. The hardest challenge was yet to come; few made it up the mountain, but fewer still could bring themselves to return the bowl after drinking. Only the wise ones knew the fate of those without honor. Hera would not fail. She would be a Wise One. She must be a Wise One.

Frost

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There were lights in the mist. I glanced at the sun overhead as if to reassure myself that it was in fact daylight, that the glare that squinted my eyelids reflected from the snow. Surely that’s all it was, my eyes playing tricks. It was just bright spots under the trees where the light made it through the canopy.

There was no canopy. The branches were bare except for the straight evergreens, but they stretched over summer shadows. And there were lights, dancing now in a fog that drifted like smoke. I shivered, shuddered really, but my feet wouldn’t obey my will to run. Run as fast as you can. Run away!

There were footprints on the bridge. Someone had scraped the path, and the handrails might have never seen snow, but the boards underfoot were invisible through a layer of scuffled snow and ice. Flakes puffed up and fell again as I watched, leaving new marks. My teeth chattered, and I shook my head frantically.

Gran had told me of the frost brownies. Tales for children. No serious adult would believe such fairy stories, but then again Gran had always been a bit strange. A puff of snow fell across my shoe and I stared at it without comprehension. Ice crawled up my leg, tickled my spine like sweat in the summer except in reverse. My hair crackled slightly and a loose lock fell into my face, swinging oddly. Then it giggled.