Flash Fiction – Page 19 – Jeff Coleman Writes

The Fog

By Jeff Coleman / December 4, 2019 December 3, 2019 / Evil, Fantasy, Flash Fiction, Horror, Surreal

2 Comments

Fog curls around my ankles like creeping vines, and all I can think as I stand there in the dark, surrounded by death, and stare up at a cold and lifeless sky, is how the world wasn’t always like this—how it was once bright, how it was once young and new, pristine and undefiled, a shining luminescent jewel that inspired wonder rather than fear and hope rather than despair.

But those days are gone, dead and buried along with most of the population. I watch dark and dangerous clouds gather in a dusky blood-red sky, and when I tire of watching the wounded horizon, my eyes drift back to the ground and the swell of fog churning at my feet.

What secrets does the fog conceal? What hidden horrors lurk beneath its tainted gunsmoke exterior? I feel the weight of its touch as it swirls above the ground, and if I strain my ears, if I focus on the many silences of the world and the dead things in between, I can hear it speak.

Your life belongs to me.

I used to hear its call as a child, either at night before the flames of a dwindling fire, or during the day in the dark alleys of an ancient city turned graveyard. It’s always reaching out, trolling the tenebrous waters of a forsaken world in search of prey, and there’s always someone who listens. As for myself, its call has grown more insistent, and as time wears on, as I pass through the threshold from youth into old age, the lunatic cry becomes increasingly difficult to resist.

Your life belongs to me, it says every night before I fall asleep and every morning when first I wake, and every day, I find myself more inclined to agree.

Now, here I stand, broken and defeated. I can fight the fog no longer, and though my mind urges me to run away, to flee into those few remaining corners of the world where the fog hasn’t gained a foothold, I have not the strength to go on.

Once, I think as the fog creeps up my legs, life was worth protecting. Now, what is there to look forward to each day but a bloated, terminally diseased sky? What is there to pass on to future generations? The fog took away our reason to live, and now that it’s prevailed, what is left to do but answer its death call?

Your life belongs to me, it says, sweeping up my back and my chest, over my shoulders and my head, and when that fetid off-white mist pierces my lips, when it shoots down my throat and into my lungs, I give in at last.

Your life belongs to me, it says again, and just before I close my eyes, just before the last of the oxygen is squeezed from my lungs and the final darkness of death blossoms before my fading vision, I hear my silent reply.

Take me away, I say, and the fog does exactly as I command.

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©2019 Jeff Coleman. All rights reserved. For reproduction rights, please contact the author (who happens to be a kind and eminently reasonable man.) Unless otherwise stated, images are copyrighted by various artists and licensed by Shutterstock.

Oracle

By Jeff Coleman / November 27, 2019 November 26, 2019 / Fantasy, Flash Fiction, Surreal

4 Comments

I apologize for making you uncomfortable. I know many find the way I stare unsettling, and like you, they always look away, hoping I won’t notice their awkward shoulder shrugs or the way they turn their heads.

I don’t do it on purpose. It’s just the way I am. It makes me uncomfortable, too, and while you might have to contend with a stranger’s awkward stare, what I have to deal with is far worse.

They found me in a crack house when I was an infant, unwanted and unloved. If not for their intervention, I wouldn’t be alive today. Sometimes, I wonder if they ever truly loved me. Their concern for my well being seemed genuine, but at the end of the day, I was human and they were not. On some fundamental level, a communion of equal minds was impossible, and when I look back, I wonder if I might just have been some alien child’s adopted puppy or kitten.

Either way, they turned me loose upon the Earth on my eighteenth birthday. It was hard going at first, with no human schooling or skills. Human relationships and social interactions were a mystery to me, and it was a while before I learned how to eke out a modest living for myself.

Most challenging of all was coming to grips with how other humans perceive time. For most, it’s a line that flows in only one direction, when in reality it’s more like a universe, expansive, multidimensional, and bubbling with probabilities. My caretakers perceived this truth, and they no doubt passed it on to me.

Like an oracle, when I behold the world and the creatures who inhabit it, I see their futures, fanning out before them like an endless cosmic sea. I view both good fortunes and bad—unexpected inheritances, reunited families, forthcoming promotions, and financial prosperity; or else addiction, poverty, gruesome murders, and terminal diseases. I have a morbid fascination with the latter, and though I do my best to ignore these dark and pallid visions, sometimes, like a trainwreck or a fatal car accident, it’s impossible to look away.

As for the terrible things I see in your future, well, I’d rather not say. Humans are better off not knowing their fortunes. I understand this from experience. Just know that I wish you all the best, that if our paths should ever cross again, I mean you no harm. As I’ve told you already, I don’t mean to stare.

It’s just the way I am.

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