Hello everybody! Let's bring Flash Fiction Friday - and this blog - back.
I'm commuting thrice a week, so these will all be super-short pieces I can finish on my morning commute from Huntington to Penn Station.
Most of these will come with a picture, though the picture may or may not have anything directly to do with the story.
We'll see how many Fridays I can keep this up this time.
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She Remembers
She watches from the sky. It’s all she can do now.
That, and remember.
She remembers travelling, from great cities with terraced
hanging gardens, past the life-giving river peopled by her single-headed cousins.
Across the sea to the bottomless lake she called home.
Travelers would see her, but rarely and only once. Some
whispered that beyond her lake lay the realm of the dead, where men eternally
slumber. She cared not for that, only for the cool waters of the lake, the way
the bones of its fish crunch when she caught them in one of her mouths. Yes,
her time in the lake was the best time of her life, or at least the most peaceful.
She’d have been pleased to know that is how we named her.
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| Sculpture by Luciano Garbati |
That time was long ago.
It ended the way all such things end, with a hero. You know
the kind, and you know the story. We tell it again and again.
Greater than any mortal man, clad in valor and glory and the
skin of a lion, wielding a blade. They always wield a blade.
They always bring a friend, a sidekick, a spearcarrier. Were
the hero alone, who would tell their tale?
You know the story of the fight. IT’s been told enough. What
you don’t know, what you perhaps never wondered, is why? Why would she not snap
up the spearcarrier, break her in those mighty jaws, extinguish the burning
brand in his fist as she extinguished his life? She was not a stupid beast, and
she’s known the hero would not prevail. Could not prevail alone. This she knew,
but there’s something we don’t know.
The hero – the one wearing the skin of another beast he’d slain
– was not the first. She was a proving ground, a test. Her mistress would call
to her, she’d rise. And fight. Sometimes she’d flee and the hero could say she’d
been vanquished. Sometimes she’d taste flesh and bones that crunch so much
harder than those of fishes.
Always she’d leave with another wound, another scar.
She was tired. She was done. So she fought, hard enough to
put on a good show, not smart enough to win. Each kiss of the flame seared,
burned, ached. And then her last head was struck clean off, and then it was
over.
Silence.
Darkness.
Until her mistress gathered what was left, painted her
essence into the vault of stars where she remains now, a dream, an idea, the
last of her kind. Would she weep to know that we think of her – if at all – as a
mere monster, an obstacle, a footnote in the hero’s story?
Or have her thoughts grown beyond us as she looks down from what
is left of the heavens, now littered with younger and tamer dreams?
Watching.
Remembering.
