Flash Fiction Friday - Returning

One more Friday flash. A quick piece not at all inspired by the fact that my child is at last returning home after a month at sleepaway camp.

Returning

You weren’t thinking about your partner or your child when you made the wish. You should have been, but who wouldn’t wish to live forever? It’s what people have sought throughout the ages. Your wish was granted; you’d join the revels in the fairy realm and live forever.

So they took you, away from this world, to the fairy realm and the revels there. So you dances, you frolicked. You drank sweet nectar, ate ambrosia. You thought you’d stay for a day, return to your family.

The moon rose, the moon set. And again, and again.

Through it all you dance, you eat, and you drink. Finally, you realized that even if this iss life eternal, it isn’t really a life. SO you leave, walking back towards your home and family.

You leave the glen where the fey held their revels, you walk through a dark forest. You remember to stay on the path, confident that it would leave back, back to your world. The path always leaves home, for those who stay on it. This you believe.

A year passes. You forget the sound of your partner’s voice.

You reach the end of the forest, find yourself at the edge of a trackless desert. Surely home will be on the other side. Surely.

You walk, navigating by the inconstant stars and the memory of your child’s eyes. Bright blue eyes.

You’ve learned your lesson from the revel, resist the temptation to pause at an oasis and drink. You’re hungry and thirsty.

Ten more years pass before you leave the desert. You forget the color of your child’s hair.

You come to the ocean, build a raft of driftwood. Home must be nearby. You push off into the sea and drift.

Twenty years pass, and then another twenty. You forget your partner’s voice, the color of your child’s hair.

You forget your own name.

You drift until, in the distance, you spy a lighthouse. Its beacon is blue, the color of your child’s eyes. The only thing you remember.

 

On the shore, beyond the beach you find a small house in which an old, old person sits watching the sea. Their eyes are blue, the blue you remember.

You great them. Tears well up in those blue eyes as you embrace, and as you realize that you did it all wrong. They should have wandered, you should have stayed home to wait.

Flash Fiction Friday - The Laptop Whisperer

A fragment this time, which like so many fragments may or may not stretch out to a full length work.

I like the character of the "laptop whisperer" and we'll perhaps learn about him and see a bit more of him.

The Laptop Whisperer

They called him the laptop whisperer.

Nobody really knew how he did it, but they knew he did. He'd wave his hand over a power brick -- always his left hand, the one with the jagged scar near the little finger - and stare off into space for a moment. Then he'd tell us, without fail and with one hundred percent accuracy, whether or not there was something wrong with it. A loose connection, a fluctuation in the output voltage. He'd get it right. Every time.

If anyone asked how he did it, he'd smile, wave his fingers in complex patterns, and say, "Maybe I'm a wizard".

He was not, of course, a wizard. Just someone willing to take risks, who knew that the human body and brain are flexible and adaptable, that the brain will learn to recognize anything, including a magnetic sensor implanted in your left hand, behind a surgical scar.

It became an obsession with him, this second-sight. He of course added more. He can smell WiFi. taste magnetic fields. Hear variations in background radiation. He outgrew DIY modifications, sought far and wide for those with medical training, and resources, and few ethics.

He began to think himself a wizard.

The brain is flexible, but the brain is not infinite.

It's the last one that did him in -- cosmic background radiation. You see, the universe is never silent. It's always there, a hum in the back of his head that he just can't tune out.

He hasn't slept in weeks. It keeps him awake, the universe. After a time, it learns how to make sense of things.


As he lies awake, with no other sound, he hears it. He's starting to make sense of it. He hasn't yet, but he's starting to.

The universe is talking to him.


What's it saying? Is it telling him the secret meaning of creation? Is it guiding him, teaching him? Is it telling him to commit unspeakable evils?


Until we're willing to reshape our brains as he did, and learn to listen.

Flash Fiction Friday - The Fairy Guardian

Flash Fiction Friday again - with a trip to suburbia and a glance at one of those odious "blue lives matter" flags. Are the people who fly them what we'd expect? 

The Fairy Guardian

Nobody in the suburbs knows anyone else. Oh, I know they see me out every morning to raise the flag with the blue stripe across the middle. From that they probably think they know everything about me. That I'm a steady man. Solid. Reliable. Honorable. Those things are true, if they could see beyond the wooden stockade fence they'd see another side.

They'd see the fairy garden.

It started with Mrs. Gant, who used to live next door. The kind of neighborhood catlady that would have been hanged as a witch in a different century. She always had the most perfect garden, the most vibrant flowers, the fattest tomatoes. I like gardening myself (see, you don't know everything about me) and asked her secret.

I remember to this day, how it felt to come into her yard. Like I was intruding into a feminine space where men don't belong. The smell of lavender and hibiscus, the delicate garden statues, the path of decorative stepping stones leading to a hidden spot beneath the forsythia bush where broken seashells were arranged in an abstract pattern. She waved her arm expansively, inviting me to take in the space, "This is my secret. I do it for them, to make them feel welcome."

"To make who feel welcome?"

She smiled. "The fey folk, of course. Fairies love lavender and hibiscus and spaces decorated with pretty stoneworks and little bits from far-off places. I give them a home and they give me their blessings."

It seemed true. Her yard was brighter than the others, her flowers grew bigger and more vibrant. Even the air had a different feel, a different energy. Even her sky seemed brighter.

Mrs Gant is long gone, but I learned from her, and even gathered some of the things from her fairy garden. A few of the little statues, a handful of seasells. The flowers I grew myself. The fairy-home
grew from a corner to where it is now, filling in the fenced-in backyard, with worn stepping stones cutting paths through fields of cultivated wildflowers.  I think all the fairies from the neighborhood have come to live here by now, which is good. IT means it's time.

How to attract fairies isn't the only thing I've learned.

Yesterday I turned on the garden hose which loops the yard three times. Three is a magic number, and fairies can't cross running water. Those that are here will remain here. They'll remain here as I sprinkle the garden with iron filings, they'll weaken.

They'll die.

And after that this cul-de-sac will be what it always should have been - a human place. Mrs. Gant attracted the infestation, I'm exterminating it.

I'm doing it for the neighbors, for the children. They deserve a human place.

They deserve protectors.

And now you know me.