Good morning friends, if anyone is still here.
These pages have remained empty for a long time, and I skipped this whole exercise last year as pandemic brain kind of melted me. The game is the same - one piece of flash fiction per day, written one day late in the early morning. Just little sketches here to get the brain moving and put us in the October mood.
Project is courtesy of Andrea Trask, sometimes known as Bliss Morgan. If you want to play along, prompts are here on the Tumblr. She also has a Patreon for those who wish to patreonise her.
Now, on with it.
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There are whispers of a place, isolated but not too isolated, where the anonymous acolyte of worth holds a book. If you find him - and it isn't as hard as one would think - you'll be shown a single page.
On it is be written the greatest day of your life. The only price is that you need to look, and you'll always carry that knowledge that on one shining day - perhaps in the future, perhaps lost in your past - you had your best moment. And none before or since would measure up.
Nobody ever asks what "greatest" means. Not that the acolytes would ever tell.
I arrive on a chill October day, accompanied by a youth. They laugh nervously as we travel the tree-lined ghost-walk to the weathered stone temple of worth. "You're almost fifty. Whatever your time is, it's in the past. Why bother?"
I smile. "Maybe I just need a reminder. But we're here for you."
We step in. The acolyte is where we'd been told, covered in heavy robes. Impossible to tell who it was, male or female. They were holding a black-leatherbound book, as worn with the ravages of time as the building around us. They look first at the youth, beckon with one crooked finger. He steps forward, the book is held up to him and opened.
"October 31, 2036. You tell the truth to yourself." That's how it was written - always in the present tense, as if it is always unfolding. Right now.
2036. Fifteen years from now.
The youth steps back. "but.. I never lie for myself. It'll take fifteen years? For just that?"
The figure is silent. It always was.
I stepped forward to complete the ritual, but I already know.
"November 27, 2001. You go where you need to be."
The youth laughs, again nervously. "That's it? You went where you need to go twenty years ago? Some life, eh? You must be disappointed. What's left to live for?"
I barely hear. Because it's the date I knew. I remember the shoes I was wearing, the brown rockports with the frayed lace on one side, because I was tying them when I got the phone call. She was scared. She didn't think the doctors were paying her enough attention. She knew it was time for work, but she needed me.
I remembered she was wearing her glasses because I was left clutching them as a nurse ushered me away from the others who'd answered my calls for help.
The same nurse - or maybe a different one - asks me if she was wearing a watch. I say I don't know, and then she hands it to me. Stupidly, absurdly, I'll always wonder why she asked that.
Then I'm standing in a tiny, anonymous office built for painful conversations, staring at that watch, not even seeing what time it showed, as I'm handed a phone. "Do you need to call her family? Anyone?" I hold the receiver in my hand for a long time before I realize that I don't know what I'd even say to them. I set it down and say something. I don't remember what.
The rest is a blur from of fear, anger, frustration. The fear fades slowly over the next days, weeks, months. The sense of "not out of the woods" and "could happen again" that lingered like the scent of something long departed until, without fanfare, it is gone. Almost. There will be reminders later, over the years. Nothing is ever over.
I smile at the youth. "What I have to live for is the same reason I skipped work that day. It could have been the worst day of my life. It WAS one of the worst days. But also the greatest. I know if given the choice, you'd do the same"
We leave that place, having learned nothing.
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