Flash Fiction Friday - She Remembers

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.

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.