Monstrous May Flash Fiction
First posted in May 2022.
Following the Pack
Author's Note
I can't promise something every day for this year's Monstrous May, but I'm certainly going to play along when I can! Today I've got something for day 1's prompt, vampires. This was inspired by Fleet Foxes' "White Winter Hymnal," and also how cold I am, sweet gods it is May why is it so cold.
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Winter is too long this year. Nearly May, and still the earth sleeps beneath a smooth, sparkling layer of new snow that reflects the lamplight to give the night an enduring sunset haze. It seems as though it will last forever, but of course, nothing that seems that way ever does. I think perhaps all of us expect that, even unconsciously, when we choose this path — that for us, the world will remain in ice, exactly the way it was when we turned.
Clutching red scarves to their throats, they trudge past me and complain amongst themselves about the bitter cold. I remember the year they all complained it was too hot too soon, but they do not seem to. Mortal lives are too short to be burdened with memory; what good does it do them to spend their time remembering things that will die with them before the century’s out?
We remember. In some ways, we are nothing but memory — relics of ages past, observers of the endless parade of years, keepers of knowledge that the mortal world drops along its way.
I step out of the amber midnight light and into the shadows of an alley. A sluggish heartbeat pounds in the darkness ahead, the blood freezing in mortal veins. He is too cold to move, and does not resist as I unwrap his scarf from his neck.
As my teeth sink into his throat, my mind is flooded with his memories; the blood, as one of our number so famously said, is the life, after all, and I take his life into me. Moments of passion, moments of pain: all of it passes now into eternity, carried by myself alone as the snow at his limp feet turns the red of a summer sunrise.
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Monster Under The Bed
Springs stretch and creak over my head, and my heart leaps, knowing you’re here. So close that, could I reach through the frame and the mattress that separate us, I might touch you. I wonder if you feel my presence; if, though you never speak it aloud, you sense the electric thrum in my veins when you’re near. Who could love you more than I, who listens to your breathing grow heavy in the most intimate hours of night? I hear you wake with a startled gasp and wonder when I’ll gain the courage to soothe you back to sleep.
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Centaurs And Satyrs
Sweat dripped down Ampelos’ face as he whirled around the bonfire with the other satyrs. There was a weight in his stomach he’d never felt during their revels before that could only be due to their guest. Unobserved, there had been no cause for shame or self-consciousness.
Perhaps sensing his reticence, Dionysus reached out, holding Ampelos’ gaze with wine-dark eyes reflecting the dancing firelight. “What troubles you?”
Hesitantly, Ampelos took his outstretched hand. “I well know we are beasts.”
“Perhaps,” Dionysus said, smiling gently. He tucked a wreath of ivy into Ampelos’ wild, unruly hair. “But you are my beast.”
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Monster In The Woods
The dirt is hard now, solid as stone after years of drought. Bare branches rattle in the harsh breeze, their percussion the only sound that rises from the once-vibrant forest. No birds have remained to sing, no foxes to hunt, nor even insects to crawl. It is a graveyard now — a grey monument to a colourful world that died in dust and neglect.
Yet, along the deserted paths, there is a sense of presence. Unseen eyes follow the movements of curious outsiders trespassing on hallowed ground. The wind stills, and cold creeps into the silence.
The forest takes a breath.
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Mermaids
Before I was born, there was salt on my tongue. I was not made for dry breezes and solid ground, hard blades of grass sharp as tiny daggers and flimsy flowers, weak and wilting in the blistering sun.
I was taken from the sea years ago. Children laugh and smile as I swim circles around my glass cage. I have watched my captor grow grey, lines deepening in his face from not only age, but worry.
Every year, the hurricanes come earlier. Every year, they are worse. I was not made for this world. And the sea wants me back.
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Possessed And Haunted
When people speak of ghosts, they tell tales of misery and tragedy. Of ill-fated affairs, star-crossed lovers, of pain and suffering, of sickness and unfulfilled yearning. Ghosts are walking sorrows, lamentable dooms, lost chances, and horrifying unkindnesses.
But what, then, of ghosts who are not? Victories undimmed by death, souls that linger in perfect contentment, unwilling to leave joy behind them. Ghosts are the triumph of love over death. For mortals, all things must end, but after the end is freedom unending. To endure, and endure, and endure — to have all of time, and to fill that time with love.
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Constructs and Automata
Author's Note
I swear I had an actual title for this piece and I can't for the life of me remember it. Anyway it's based on the Silver Swan automaton at the Bowes Museum.
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“I watched the Silver Swan, which had a living grace about his movement and a living intelligence in his eyes — watched him swimming about as comfortably and unconcernedly as it he had been born in a morass instead of a jeweller’s shop — watched him seize a silver fish from under the water and hold up his head and go through the customary and elaborate motions of swallowing it...” — Mark Twain, Innocents Abroad
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I wonder — and I have had much time to wonder — what it is about replication that fascinates humans so. Outside there is a world of real water in real lakes that sparkles under real sunlight, beneath which real fish swim and on which real swans glide. Yet here they are, their gawking faces pressed to the glass around me.
It strikes me as vanity, more than anything else. What exists independent of human creation is less interesting to them than what can be crafted with their own hands. The whirring clock draws me to preen feathers that have never been ruffled, and breaths of delight ripple through the crowd, not because it is I that preen my feathers, but because it was a human hand that sculpted that silver, a human hand that engineered the gears that drive my performance. Humans are uninvolved in the preening of an actual swan’s feathers; thus, they do not care.
Even so, I do not dream of a beating heart. I would not trade my pond of glass for the shining lakes of my breathing brethren. Oh, the humans have their vanity, but I have mine, too. In a world of fleeting beauties and small miracles that pass in the blink of an eye, I am what they come to see. If humans love me as a creation of their own, still, they love me.
Dead are the hands that made me, and dead are the swans that came before. Gears turn, and I devour a silver feast more satisfying than any living swan’s dream as the lights of a thousand cameras flash, glinting on my feathers like stars I will never see.