Ephemeron Read online

Ephemeron

  by G. Deyke

  Copyright 2015 G. Deyke

  Thank you for your download of this ebook. You may share it non-commercially as much as you like, provided it remains complete, unaltered and properly attributed: copy it, gift it, print it out on bacon with non-toxic ink and feed it to a passing ichthyosaur. Just don't ask the ichthyosaur to pay you for it. It wouldn't be able to anyway: they aren't known for carrying wallets.

  If you enjoyed this ebook (and not just because it was given to you, an ichthyosaur, in the form of bacon), please consider taking a look at G. Deyke's other work.

  Thank you for your support.

  Contents

  Introduction

  Where Sunshine Cannot Follow

  Melissandra's Last Day

  Good Intentions

  Ephemeron

  Sarah

  Complacency

  Why Not to Nap

  Fire Burns

  Fav This Tweet

  Short Fuse

  The True Meaning of Affection

  Butterfly

  Expulsion

  They Long to be Heard

  And the Night Answered

  Blood and Brie

  Damien

  Nameless

  I Will Always be Waiting

  What Hails From the Heavens

  Absence

  Faith and Ambition

  The Beldam's Leer

  I Will Save Them

  The Great Gauntlet

  The First of My Kind

  Proximity

  The Price

  The Princess of the Frozen Realm

  The King's Gifts

  Jeanne's Miracle

  Closing Words

  Find G. Deyke Online

  Introduction

  Few things are as ephemeral by nature as flash fiction. In no more than a thousand words (though, here, no less than fifty-five) one has time to paint a single moment, a single story, a single scene: and then the moment is over and the story resolved, and only the impression of it remains.

  These thirty-one ephemera were written as a part of Flash Fiction Month, which is just what it sounds like: thirty-one stories for the thirty-one days of July, nearly half of them meeting additional challenge criteria. They are varied, diverse, unconnected, and otherwise dissimilar. They will not take much of your time.

  They will, however, leave an impression: and that, I hope, will last a great deal longer.

  Please enjoy.

  Where Sunshine Cannot Follow

  In the mornings, he kisses his husband and his wife goodbye, takes his briefcase and his lunch, and goes to work. He remembers their warmth as he waits for the bus. He knows they will be waiting for him when he returns, each with a hug and a kiss for him, and their smiles will break down the clouds just as they always do, and he will be happy.

  He spends his lunch hours pacing the roof, begging himself not to let himself fall.

  Melissandra's Last Day

  Challenge #1: write a steampunk story.

  Melissandra checked her watch again, then snapped it shut and pocketed it with a sigh. She had seven minutes left to wait: not long, but enough to make the waiting hurt. She was nervous enough already.

  She resumed pacing the platform. She was too wound-up to sit, and having to dodge the milling crowd helped to take her mind off the journey.

  “Flowers, miss?”

  A greasy-looking man with a goatee and velvet top hat was thrusting a bouquet of roses at her face. Melissandra turned pointedly away, but passers-by were blocking her path, and the man danced around back in front of her. “You won't find flowers like this on the moon, miss. I've got red roses, orange roses, yellow roses, tulips, pansies, geraniums...”

  “No, thank you.” Melissandra tried again to turn past him, but the man was in her way. “The moon is famed for its gardens,” she told him with a polite smile.

  “White flowers, glowing flowers, yes – but do you think you will find color there? Do you think you won't miss the red of a rose?” He singled one out and held it beneath her nose. “Come, take one with you, miss – to remind you of your home!”

  “It will wilt before I get there,” Melissandra pointed out.

  “Ah... then maybe you want our souvenir line? Carved out of thornwood, edged in colored brass, here is a rose that will last forever!”

  Melissandra sighed, checked her watch again – four minutes until the train would arrive: too long to use it as an excuse to leave, too short to keep arguing lest she risk losing her seat – and gave up. She paid the man, collected her wooden trinket, and watched the velvet top hat disappear into the crowd.

  She held the wooden rose in front of her as she sat on the train, watching the flashes of sunlight blinking off the colored brass. She hoped it would shine as brightly in the light of the moon.

  Good Intentions

  The mice have been silent for many days, now. She misses the way they used to chitter and squeak and climb on their wheel. She misses watching them move: they have been sleeping, utterly still, not even twitching in their dreams.

  She wonders what she could do to cheer them up. Apparently the vodka didn't.

  Ephemeron

  Challenge #2: write a 600-word story containing dreams or dream-like imagery and elements of stream-of-consciousness.

  He thought that he was drunk at first, but now he isn't so sure. The world is melting all around him. He can't remember how he got here.

  He remembers walking. He was going down a street; images flashed by and stuck in his brain: a streetlamp, a signpost, a tree, a patch of grass; but there was no continuity, no sense of connection from one scene to another. He found himself on the ground at one point, with no memory of falling.

  He remembers thinking, then, that there is some undeniable similarity between drunkenness and dreaming.

  Did he drink? He thought so; but now he isn't sure. Some vestige of sobriety knows that mere alcohol would never suffice to explain this. He must be dreaming. He must be asleep.

  The street turned to ashes beneath his feet. There was a mountain ahead of him; he climbed. He ripped out spiny plants and thornbrush to hold his footing, and his hands ran red with blood.

  There was a dragon ahead of him. He remembers a sense of having to hide, but he can't remember hiding; still, the moment passed and the dragon with it and he was still alive. He fought his way onwards. There was a place he needed to get to, he knows: a cave filled with gold and darkness, a place he had to hide.

  But now the landscape is twisting and melting all around him, reforming into darkness. Shadowy seaweed brushes at his face. He breathes.

  Above him the sky is pale gray and black. There is a castle towering beyond the weedy moor, dark cracked slimy stone, empty. He knows it is empty. He knows, but part of him wants to run and hide and part of him knows he must go closer: something is tugging at him, pulling him in.

  He does both.

  Running, hiding, he is found by crows and they tear him apart and scatter his flesh and devour him. It is pain. And he is creeping towards the castle, dodging from tree-shadow to sheltered hassock, hiding from the cold white open air.

  There are worms in the water, white and wriggling. Above him the chill of the wind is watching, lurking, threatening. He dares not feel its cold touch on his shoulder. He dares not: he ducks low and waits for it to pass, and slips onwards through the worm-water, as silent as silent can be.

  Is he drunk or dreaming? He wants to drink the worm-water. He wonders how it would taste, wriggling down his throat.

  Then there is a hand on his arm, cold and dry and thin, strong, strong, holding him fast: he turns to find it all of bones, a skeletal arm reaching up from the moor, holding him tightly, gripping him fast; a skull stares up at him with empty
eyes, dry and cracked, half-buried. He struggles in vain.

  “Listen,” says the skull, without a mouth. Its jaw is stuck in the mud, unmoving.

  He doesn't listen. He doesn't have time. If he doesn't keep moving the wind will find him. The cold bitter open wind – it will find him, it must not find him, it must not find him. He tries to pry the long strong finger-bones from his wrist, tries to keep walking, tries to will himself into the shadow of the boulder ahead of him, but he is tethered by skeletal strength and cannot move.

  “Listen,” says the skeleton, sinking, dragging him down along with it. “Listen. Listen.”

  He yells an answer, frantic.

  “Listen,” says the skeleton.

  He listens.

  “You aren't dreaming, love.”

  Sarah

  Sarah clothed herself in flame. Her hair was orange and red and yellow, left to fly free when she danced, and her fingernails shone fiery-bright. She called to mind a phoenix, an ifrit, a goddess of the sun. And she was beautiful.

  But she was no goddess and no djinni and no flaming bird. Sarah tended bars. She spent half her days and most of her nights mixing cocktails, wiping down tables, avoiding the fingers of drunks who'd later claim they didn't know what they were doing. She wouldn't avoid their eyes: Sarah had fire in her eyes, and when she stared back at them they'd mostly leave her alone, muttering apologies and fumbling for tips.

  It wasn't a bad life. But on days when the sun shone bright and Sarah danced barefoot through its beams, her flame-colored hair and clothing sparkling as they swung around behind her, she found herself wishing for more: she wanted fire in her life, something that would move and grow and change. She wanted the glow of destruction.

  No one had anything but pity for her when her apartment caught fire, nor when an explosion in the