It was with her for as long as she could remember, a thin golden thread of light that tugged at her as if she were a hooked fish. She had no idea where it came from or where it led. She only knew that it was always pulling, that with every passing year the tightness increased until the pain was too much to bear.
Nobody else could see it. Not her mother or father, not her relatives, not her friends. It got to be so bad that she spent most days alone, afraid others would think she was crazy.
On her eighteenth birthday, the pain blossomed into searing fire. Not knowing what else to do, she left home, left behind everyone and everything she’d ever known. She followed the pull of the thread out of Phoenix, out of Arizona, out of the US. Traveling helped; the thread slackened when she followed. She spent most of her life allowing it to drag her across the world, never knowing where or if it would end.
Now, after more than forty years of never staying in one place, she stands before a tiny redbrick house in Belgium and knows that she’s come home. She sees that the golden thread leads here, that inside the house there is an even brighter glow. This is where her journey ends.
She swallows, takes a deep breath, walks up and knocks on the door. There’s a brief moment where she wonders what she’ll do if it doesn’t open, and then it does. Gold floods her vision.
“Come in,” says a kindly voice. “I’ve been waiting for you.”
She enters. The door closes behind her.
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“No, Daddy. I can’t. It’s too hard.” Conall pushed, slammed into the invisible wall with as much force as he could muster, and still wasn’t able to break through. “Help me.”
“This is something you have to do yourself.”
“Help me!” Couldn’t Daddy see that it was too hard? Conall was only seven. Traveling, pushing through the boundary between the worlds, was beyond him.
“You have to learn, son. You can’t stay in one world forever, and I won’t always be around to help you.”
“But I don’t want to. I’m not ready!”
“You are ready. I learned at your age, and so did your grandfather before me. It runs in the family. You can do it. You’re strong.”
Conall tried again, took hold of space and time, pushed and stretched them as far as they would go. For a moment the fabric of reality bent further than it had before, and he thought this time he might actually poke through. But then it pushed against him once more, casting him back into his exhausted body as it collapsed.
Conall’s face turned red. He’d tried a dozen times. Space and time were pliable, yes, but also firm and durable. He could stretch them, but only so far. Tears spilled from his eyes, and he had to work very hard to stop them. He was a failure. He would be the only Doran in fifteen generations to settle on a single world, incapable of pushing the frontier any further. Daddy would be ashamed.
“Conall, you’re trying too hard. Don’t force it. The harder you push, the harder it pushes back. Remember what I taught you.”
“I can’t do it.”
“You can. The blood of your ancestors is in you. You have their strength.”
Conall took a deep breath, shut his eyes and reached out once more. He seized space and time, grasped them firmly inside his mind, and pushed. The universe met his show of force with one of its own.
Then Daddy’s words popped into his head. Don’t force it. But how could he get through to the other side if he didn’t push? This time he felt more closely, examined the weave of the universe in greater detail.
There, a loose thread. How had he missed it before? He pulled, and it slipped free with almost no effort. There was a frightening moment in which he could feel the cosmos groan, where the fibers of reality unraveled, coming apart like a frayed tapestry. Then space and time righted themselves, became whole once again. And where he’d tugged one of those fibers loose there was now a hole, a soft spot where one world bled into the other.
“Daddy, I did it!”
“Yes,” Daddy said, smiling. “You did. I’m proud of you.”
“Daddy, can we go through?”
“If you want to.” He swept Conall into his arms.
They stepped through together, father and son, and emerged in a new world.
This piece of flash fiction is dedicated to all the fathers who, like mine, have been an unwavering source of love and encouragement from Day One. Happy belated Father’s Day!
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