A Father’s Encouragement

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“Come on, son. You can do it.”

“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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Jeremy

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Jeremy glanced down at his hands, which were hidden beneath the table on his lap. A moment later he closed his eyes. It was happening again.

Tiny beads of sweat popped out of his cheeks and forehead. He could feel the pressure mounding. He wouldn’t be able to hold it in much longer.

“Please,” he whispered. “Not again.”

He looked around the crowded downtown plaza and panicked.

He saw a familiar-looking man bite into a sandwich, and his mind did a jump shot to his old best friend Patrick, who’d disappeared when he was only ten. He turned and spotted a pair of brightly dressed women chatting at a table, and was instantly transported back to high school, to the girls he’d always wanted to talk to but never had the courage to approach. They too had disappeared.

“Why is this happening?” Jeremy asked, grasping the table with trembling knuckle-white hands. He could feel the power welling up inside, knew that it would burst from him like a firework no matter what he did.

He looked down at his hands again. They’d begun to glow a faint, swampy green.

“Not again,” he moaned. “Please, not again.”

He clamped down harder on the table. His grip was so tight he thought it might snap in two. Then he convulsed. His head whipped back, his stomach clenched and he was certain everything he’d eaten for a year would come back up again. He gasped and shuddered. Shrieked. Brightness filled his vision.

A moment later, all was dark.

*    *    *

The first light to reach Jeremy’s eyes was cracked and broken. He lifted his head mechanically and sat up straight.

When his mind came back online he whirled. He searched his surroundings, already knowing what he would find but hoping this time would be different.

Jeremy was alone.

The tables were empty. There was no sign anyone had ever been there. Silence hovered over the plaza like a thick fog. Tears began to fall from Jeremy’s eyes. He raked a hand through his hair, gazed up at the sky and shouted.

“Why?”

It was the same thing that had happened to Patrick and the girls from high school. They were there. Then his hands started to glow. There was light, then dark, and when he came to they were gone.

The glow was gone now, just as it had gone before. Now, all he could do was wonder how long it would be before it happened again.

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