#fridayflash

NonFiction #fridayflash


He’d written their story every way but the way it actually happened and now with a fifth century without her slipping away into another millennium, Talesin, teller of tales, decided to tell the truth.

The misdirecting ballads and epic romances full of adventure and magic began innocently, born as it was from a need to conceal their strange near immortality, a gift that was less a liability in the beginning than it was now. She had loved the names he chose for her. Grainne. Isolde. Guinevere. But she wearied of the distortion of the facts in short order and the way Talesin fused their love to the ideals of the era and area until it was twisted and wrung out of shape.

In particular she loathed the round table and Camelot, story elements of which he was particularly proud.

“Lancelot?” she raged. “Was he that foppish priest in Calais? The one who leered at me over a consecrated host no less? He’s the best model of virtue you can manage? Robbie’s head would explode if he knew, and still had a head, and was ever all that virtuous. Sometimes your inspirations leave me to wonder if we share the same memories at all.”

She’d refused his bed for weeks after  she’d finished reading the orginal draft, but Talesin refused to change a word. It was his first book. He’d never seen a book, but the bible. His own tale, penned finely and bound in a soft leather with his name on it was not something he would forego for anyone. Even her. A real book that acknowledged him as storyteller

“It’s not even your real real name,” she’d reminded him, but he didn’t care.

The book placed them in good stead in the French court and garnered the admiration of the Queen, who took them with her when she finally left Francois. The time they’d spent with the Duchess in her native Aquitaine proved Talesin’s most fertile writing period, but she scoffed at the shallowness of it all.

“When was I ever rendered wet to the knees by bad poetry sung off key?” she said with that snicker-like giggle and a toss of her thick red mane.

He shared her views of the Duchess’s ideas about men and women but needed the patronage, and it wasn’t safe for them to return to Britain. There were still others. They were too well remembered.

She had the last laugh when the Duchess ran off to the soggy isle with that rakish Plantagenet heir.

“She’ll get precious little adoration and devotion from that one,” she said.

Talesin said nothing. He liked Duchess and hoped young Duke could  fashion a grown woman out of someone so determined to be a maid, in spirit if not in fact. It had long since occurred to him that his Lady’s infatuation with chaste love was yet another method humans used to slow time or turn it back. And when the romance fizzled so famously, she had said,

“It must bring Eleanor no end of joy to be the living embodiment of one of her insipidly tragic ballads.”

She left the century after. Talesin was in prison when she was taken ill and missed her passing. Imprisonment was a writer’s fate from time to time in those days. He envied her freedom. While his was a corporeal body almost without end, hers was a soul that repeated intact from one body to the next.

To make it easy for him to find her, she would select the region – sometimes even the family – of her next incarnation well in advance of her death, and he would wait for her to be reborn and mature again. During her absences he would spin their union and adventures into fanciful stories that only she would recognize as true.

But she had not returned to him, or at all as far as he could tell. Even those rare times when death had snatched her unexpectedly with reunion plans not yet made, Talesin had been able to find her. She’d warned that she would not join him again unless he told their story. The truth with all its secrets and pain and plainness. But he had refused. She’d always come back to him.

“We’re quits then,” she whispered into his ear the last time he saw her. ” I want to hear the truth from your inky tongue. Read it on a page in your words. I am done with the recycling of lies.”

The screen was blank. The keyboard silky under his finger pads as they drew absent circles waiting for his words. He wondered what to call their story. A story that only by accident came to include her, he had pointed out once, and he should be able to recount it as he liked.

“Always the magician, eh, Merlin?” she questioned. “Illusions and sleights are the tools of wizards and writers?”

“The feelings are always true,” he’d said in his own defense.

“Weighted like kittens in a sack,” was her reply.

“I’m a storyteller,” he said.

“That’s for certain.”

Talesin caressed the qwerty and began.

Rex 84 – The Beginning #fridayflash


It was the second Wednesday in November.  I hadn’t heard from my husband in four days and woke to news that the gates of our enclosed community had been closed and barricaded overnight.

“I’ve heard they’re going door to door looking for US citizens,” a neighbor told me.  She’d slipped out after her husband had gone out to the fields that morning to warn me.  She didn’t know we were dual citizens and hadn’t traveled using our US passports in years.  I wasn’t even sure which packing crate they were in.  We’d moved four times since leaving the US.  Twice since obtaining Canadian citizenship through my native born husband.

I thanked her.  I didn’t know her name at the time.  She was native.  They didn’t mix much with the expatriates.  A cultural preference more than a religious objection.

News reel exploded from the flat screen at the end of the breakfast nook.  Grainy cell phone images from Flickr and video from YouTube hastily retrieved by Al Jazeera before the media blackout highlighted a frightening recitation of silenced Twitter feeds and Facebook updates.  The revolution did not take place in cyberspace, it was just recorded there for a few moments before vanishing like the people who took the pictures and dared to stand witness to history.

No one knocked on our door.  The whispered warnings were fearful winds which blew like the sandstorms, searing and scouring the unprotected in their path.  The company had locked the gates.  When the army arrived, in search of Americans “in need of assistance”, they were sent away with a reminder that the Emirate was not subject to the United States of America, but they would graciously keep them apprised of any needs that might arise.  Praise Allah.

I scanned our passports before burning them, transferred the images to flash drive before deleting the files and then I waited.

Camp sat on the gulf coast.  The moist air ran in little rivers down the panes of our hermetically sealed town home.  The winter was warmer than usual that year. Children played unattended in the park across the street.  I watched my daughter through the droplets.  And waited.

The day before Ashura, the President of the United States, addressed the world.  The next day I left my wet-eyed little girl in the care of only people I could trust, Aamina and Fahd.  They were engineers in my husband’s work group.  Aamina had checked in on me every day since my husband disappeared.  In better days, we had gathered on Friday evenings, discussing and debating while our daughters bonded in the way of little girls.

Fahd tried to discourage me.

“We can’t trust the news coming from America right now,” he said. “Wait a while longer. The company is negotiating the return of our people.”

“Your people,” I pointed out needlessly. “James is Canadian.  Enemy combatant.  You heard what that man said.”

“I don’t believe the Canadians have closed their border or that the Americans see them as threats,” Fahd said. “It was a bad election. That happens.  Americans have been spoiled by their democratic illusions.  The people there will learn in time and all will return to normal. Patience.”

“Not my virtue,” I said.  James would have smiled.  Fahd frowned but in the end agreed to shield my child until I returned with her father.

Without a passport,  I waited at the front gate until the Army transport arrived to collect me.  A guard stood uneasily at either shoulder, clearly disapproving but Fahd had accompanied me and spoken to them on my behalf before hugging me and driving off.

Heavily armed soldiers sandwiched me on the trip to a small airstrip near their base.  Eyes shielded by mirrored sunglasses, their body language obscured under layers of kevlar and khaki.  Their camp was in disarray and I learned from the handful of other detained Americans that the Emirate had politely insisted on their withdrawal.

“Where are we going?” I asked a tall, dusty man who appeared the least shell-shocked of the group I found myself among.

“South Carolina.  There are camps there.”

“Camps?”

“Rex 84?” he studied me and when I didn’t react continued, “It’s the Homeland Security Act that allows the president to declare martial law.   Intern citizens.”

“You mean enemy combatants,” I said, remembering the words I’d heard.

“Potato, po-tah-to,” he shrugged.

Patience, I thought.  The universe had schooled me again.

On the Road #fridayflash


Hands are not easy to remove, but with a Swiss army knife, a hammer and a pair of electric wire clippers, it can be done. They were all I had anyway.

The woman didn’t need her hand anymore. As nearly as I could figure, she hadn’t been dead for long. The tell-tale greenish cast to the skin just about the ears and the nape of the neck contrasted with her bloodless pallor, but the moist heat of the Gulf coast seeps in quickly. Dead bodies seed fast. This one wasn’t crawling  but would be soon enough.

I didn’t need the hand though I’d used fingers for the odd biometric scans that were still in use in some communities. I needed her ID braclet in tact, cutting the chain deactivates them. My own tag was worthless. I’d been issued it before the war ended and now it marked me as a transient refugee and I wasn’t going back to the camps. It was chipped as well, so I’d tossed it as soon as I could even though it was rare to run across SS outside the metropolitan areas and they are the only ones with functional scanners these days. If a person needed to cross a border however, which I did, chipless IDs were desirable. It said two things about the wearer. The first assured the border patrol the person had status prior to The Dissolution, and the second that he or she had never been detained. Detainees, who could be anyone from a simple refugee to a war crimes fugitive, were not allowed to travel freely between zones without papers. Visas were hard to get. Costly and nearly always attention attracting, I’d never bothered to try and obtain one even though I probably had connections enough still to do it.

The most important aspect of the bracelet was that, judging from its size and shape, it conferred citizenship on the wearer. I hadn’t seen one of the new IDs issued by the North American Alliance of States and Provinces, but it was similar enough to the old one that I was confident enough to sit in a ditch for two hours hacking skin and pounding bones to obtain it.

She appeared to have been thrown from a bike which I found a few meters off from her twisted corpse. I keep to the ditches when I travel the old major highways despite the paucity of traffic. It’s only marginally safer at any rate, but I exercise as much caution as I can now that I am alone.

I toyed with the idea of taking the bike too, but it would have made me a theft target and, being female I am temptation enough, so I left it with regrets. In the end I emptied her pack, keeping the useful or edible and then transferring my possession from the tattered Lululemon bag I’d liberated from a deserted store along with a few clothing items I’d always coveted but could never afford.

In the pack I found an old Canadian passport. Her name was Claire. I ripped the photo out and a couple of pages for good measure and stuffed them into a pocket of my light jacket. No one would question a beat up passport from before the war. Just having one at all was a coup.

I’d been heading west but now it was time to go north. I wasn’t sure exactly where the new border lay. The last I’d heard the NAASP extended only as far south as Missouri and just to the Mississippi, but the Confederacy had been in retreat all year and with luck I might hit the border sooner than that.

The heat settled around me like Lady Godiva’s golden tresses but in a sticky stringy way I’d come to loathe. It was not like the dry winds of the Emirate where I’d left my child in the care of friends when war broke out, trapping my husband in a disintegrating land.

The last word I had from him indicated that he was being relocated north. New Ontario maybe but more likely in the Nations. I was a long way from there.

Bracelet jangling loosely on my wrist, I climbed up the grassy hill to the road. Dusk darkened the horizon and dimmed the air all around.  I hadn’t seen or heard a motorized vehicle for almost a week. The rough pavement made for faster travel and, with my new identity, I decided to risk the scant patrols.