Flash Fiction Day 2016

Isa

In a one-room cabin bound by snow, a woman sat before a great rolltop desk, a pen in her hand and a cough frozen in her lungs. The remains of a fire smoldered in the grate, untended and struggling against the cold that crept down the chimney and through the cracks, but the woman paid it no mind, intent on the letters she scratched one by one into the loose-bound book before her.

She reached the end of a sentence, paused, and loosened the ice in her chest. The cough itched and clawed up her throat, rising into a string of explosions that shook her frail body. She fumbled in a pocket of her dress for a crumpled handkerchief and pressed it to her mouth. When the hacking settled back to a mere itch, she pulled it away, and the cloth was dotted red.

A faint trill drew her attention down to the silver-furred cat winding around her ankles. It trilled again, pale blue eyes admonishing.

“I know I shouldn’t,” the woman said, “but I--”

The itch grew claws and began to climb again. She drew a finger harshly down her sternum, desperate or impatient or both, and with the sound of snapping ice the cough froze in place again. The cat placed a dainty paw on top of her boot.

“No. Sleeping until spring won’t save me. I might be preserved that long, but this sickness won’t leave with the warmer weather.”

The cat jumped up onto her lap and butted its head against her arm. She placed one wrinkled hand on its back and stroked down its spine.

“We had a long time,” she said with a trembling smile, “but we both know everything changes - even us. We preserve things for better times. We don’t bind them for eternity.

“Change is coming. I just need a little more time to save what I can.”

The cat looked at her, then looked at her book. It pressed a nose to her chest and breathed, and the itch froze solid.

“Thank you,” she said, and as the cat lay down, purring against her stomach, she bent back to her work.

She was found when the snow thawed, still sitting at her desk as though she had fallen asleep upright, frost clinging to her dress despite the warmth. Her fingers were stained with ink, and before her lay a completed manuscript, fountain pen set neatly alongside it. The cover bore a single vertical line above the word Preservation.

There wasn’t so much as a hair of the cat to be found.

-

Wunjo

Colored balls danced in the air, cutting bright arcs above Galen’s head. Only half his attention was on them; they were kept aloft more by muscle memory and pattern than conscious design. His body smiled and laughed and juggled and bobbed for the handful of watchers he had attracted, but his mind was in a place of light and shadow, feeling its way along colored threads and streams, guided by flashes of yellow wings…

There.

He flicked the balls high, higher than before, then caught them all with a spinning flourish which rolled smoothly into a bow. The applause was slight and short-lived, only a scant few hands clapping, but the colors were brighter here than before and the smiles he saw before him, though brief, were genuine.

“Thank you!” he said, bowing again. “Thank you very much. I’m afraid that’s all for today, but I enjoyed it immensely. I hope you did the same.”

More smiles, bright colors, and several members of his audience were kind enough to drop some money into the hat he’d set on the ground before dispersing. Galen took some time to pack his equipment away - the balls, his assortment of small instruments, the worn hand puppets he kept around to entertain younger children - scooped up his hat and its contents, and wandered off down the street, toward the little town’s only inn.

It was a beautiful day, warm and sunny, and many of the buildings were painted in bright colors and decorated by flower gardens and window boxes. To the eye alone, everything was beautiful and brilliant. To a sense beyond mere sight, however, it felt dull, lifeless, and drab. Already he felt the smiles he’d left behind fading under the weight that hung over the entire town.

Galen bypassed the inn and walked to the edge of town, where he shaded his eyes and peered up the hill south and west of Main Street.

“Of course it’s the graveyard,” he said, though no one was there to hear him. “I wonder what’s causing it this time.”

Loss. Sorrow. Memories.

“As always,” Galen agreed. “I meant specifically.”

He started up the hill. A goldfinch flitted down from a tree and landed on his shoulder.

Ask?

“Not the most uplifting conversation,” Galen said, glancing at the bird with a smile. “I can hardly walk up to someone in the street and say, ‘so, I noticed a semi-mystical malaise of gloom infecting this place. Who died?’ Okay, so I technically could. I just wouldn’t want to, because it’s…kind of terrible, honestly.”

The finch bobbed its head and ruffled its wings. They reached the top of the hill, the first of the graves, and Galen took a slow, deep breath. The sunlight was clear and unhindered here, yet it felt darker and more devoid of color than it had in the town below.

“Whatever it was, it must’ve been bad,” he murmured, slowly venturing down the rows. “I’ve never felt a shadow this strong before. Heck, I didn’t know they could get this strong.”

Yes. Strong and strange.

Seeking and walking at the same time was difficult; his mind wandered heedless of physical direction or obstacles in search of the center, and more than once it carried his feet toward stubbed toes and banged shins on a weathered tombstone. The thickness of the malaise created further difficulties; Galen was unaccustomed to delving so deep to find its source, and it seemed to him that every time he thought he’d found the darkest point, his mind would discover one deeper still. Still he kept on, until he finally reached the end.

“Is this it, Win?” he asked, just to be sure. The goldfinch fluttered from his shoulder to the stone he’d stopped in front of and bobbed back and forth across it, indicating a row of graves not more than a couple of weeks old.

“Must’ve been an epidemic or an accident or something,” Galen said, kneeling to look at the name and dates. “Ah, poor kid. Maybe that explains how bad it is here.”

He reached out, touched the top of the stone with one finger, and drew an angular shape. He moved from stone to stone, repeating the motion, and when he had finished the air seemed just a little clearer, the light a little brighter than before.

“Well, it’s a start,” he said as he stood up from the last. The finch returned to his shoulder and he meandered back toward the town. “The rest is up to them. Still, I like to think we made a little difference.”

Agreed.

“Want to stay the night, do a few more shows, see if we can make just a little more of one?”

Yes.

“All right, then. Let’s see what we can do to help.”

-

Berkanan

Hartford had always had a woman in the wood. She was present in the tales of the town’s oldest living residents, in records left behind from days older still, in the vague, fantastical oral tradition of Hartford’s very founding. She was only ever human, the residents agreed with great confidence; it would be more accurate perhaps to say that Hartford had, in its long history, had several women in the wood, one after another. Sometimes the position, if it could be called such, was passed from mother to daughter. Sometimes it seemed more like an apprenticeship. One or two times the elderly one passed away only for a new young woman to move in and take over anywhere from a few days to months later.

There had always been a woman in the wood. The thing was, nobody could be quite sure what she was doing there. To outsiders, it was clearly a quaint little story maintained out of a sense of tradition or a desire to put Hartford on the map. To the locals, things were a little more complicated, though no one could say quite how.

This generation’s model was named Vera, and like many of her predecessors she had a green thumb. Unlike many of them, however, she allowed it to take over, and so her little house was awash in ivy, bursting with planters and window boxes, and surrounded by such a garden that you couldn’t see the building until you were practically at the front door.

The view from the front door was just as overrun with vegetation.

Playing ding-dong-ditch should have been cake; Mark had no idea why the other boys had smirked and snickered like they were setting him up when they dared him to do it. Maybe they thought that he thought that the woman was some kind of fairytale hag, as if he was seven and scared of ghost stories. Maybe she just had a really mean dog she sicced on troublemakers and they wanted to get a good laugh about the newcomer trying to climb the birch trees surrounding the property to escape it. Mark was good with dogs, though, so he wasn’t too worried about the possibility.

Besides, if she really did have a dog, the deer he’d spotted munching out of a flowerbed on the way up the path probably wouldn’t have been so relaxed. It hadn’t even bolted as he snuck by, just watched him as it chewed up a leafy stalk, perfectly content with the situation.

If nothing else, Mark thought, he could be doing this mystery woman a favor by playing this prank. The act of knocking and then booking it out of sight might actually startle the animal enough to get it out of her gardens.

He crept up to the door, planned the shortest possible escape route, raised a fist--

“BOO!”

Mark shrieked and fell on his backside, scrambling backwards several feet as his brain caught up to events - the door bursting open, the shout, the monstrous grinning face of the mask a laughing woman was now pulling off of her head…

“When will you kids learn you can’t get the drop on me? Well, come on, up you get now lad.”

Burning red, Mark ignored the hand she offered and picked himself up, dusting his jeans off and looking anywhere but at the woman. The deer, he noticed with a surge of annoyance, was still placidly chewing the last of its flower stalk off to the side.

“Anything hurt? Well, aside from your pride. Not much I can do to fix that, I’m afraid.”

“I’m fine,” he answered automatically, still having a staring contest with the deer and wondering what it would take to actually make the creature bolt.

“Good, then. Oh, and if you’re worried this counts as failing some sort of initiation test with the village boys, don’t be. It just means you’ll be in good company with them. Ask Davey Thomas about his go at me; he won’t tell you, but the others will.”

“Er, right,” Mark said. It was starting to sink in that he was standing awkwardly on the gravel path leading up to a door he’d just unsuccessfully tried to knock and run, being given social advice by the very person who had turned his prank against him. He wasn’t sure if he should apologize or thank her or even how he would go about either, but he felt he had to say something, so he opened his mouth and spoke the first thing that came to mind.

“You know there’s a deer eating your garden?”

“I know,” she said, casting the deer a fond look as she propped the hand holding the mask on her hip. “Don’t worry about Beroc, or the flowers. They grow back well enough in spite of him.”
Beroc simply dipped his head and found another plant to crop.

“You’d probably best run along now, though,” the woman said. “If you’re gone much longer, they might think you fainted, and you’ll never hear the end of it then.”

Mark’s eyes widened, and he wasted no time in dashing for the garden’s exit.

Vera and Beroc watched him go, one smiling, the other methodically chewing up a geranium stalk. Once it was gone, the deer snorted and stepped around the raised garden bed, heading toward Vera’s side.

“Let them have their fun,” she said. “It’s a sort that does no harm.”

Beroc flicked an ear.

“We all start somewhere. They’ll grow. Now, speaking of, let’s see about fixing what you chewed up this time.”

The deer grumbled, the woman laughed, and the world around them grew and grew.