Fugitive

“Don’t bother with the passport. It’s fake.”

He doesn’t check, just smiles smugly.

He’s too young, too eager: immaculate suit, shirt, tie; cute haircut; sharp eyes; perfect muscles. That has to be his first body, top of the range, very expensive. Me, I’m down to cast-offs. This flabby thing stinks, but it’s all I’ve got left. That, two hundred years of experience, and a hidden blade.

“Ok, old ma—”

Evisceration. The best way to interrupt a man, or fleshwalker.

As I leave he’s trying to shove his guts back in, blabbing about how much that ruined meat cost him.

(Originally written for Lily Childs' Friday Prediction)

Apocalypse

Carl remembered cities. But ‘city’, like so many other words, meant nothing anymore. Infrastructure. Internet. Communication. Multisyllabic tendencies had become redundant. The world was turning feral, and brutal Anglo-Saxon monosyllables were a better fit.

The planet had burned and civilisation was just another unnecessary word.

He hadn’t spoken in over a year. In his head he would recite the words he could remember but the list got shorter with the days. Winter was here and you could barely tell the falling snow from the ash.

There was one word he would never forget, that would never lose its meaning...

Apocalypse.

Aeon

See our fair prince entering Pharaoh’s tomb, overburdened with delusions of heroism: rescue the princess, triumph over evil. Pitiful, really. Heroism is such an irrelevant concept, like good or evil. Time matters most: erosion, evolution.

There are traps down there but they are momentary, tripped, ineffective, then done, like a human lifetime. A good curse though, lasts forever.

The hero wins, of course. What did you expect? The princess is saved; they have many children. A grand dynasty is born.

They never suspect my sweet, lingering kiss in their DNA. I live on, insidious as decay, sweeping through the centuries.

(Originally written for Lily Childs' Friday Prediction)

Poet

Youth is fleeting beauty, rose petals on the wind.

He tells them he is a poet. He publishes verses of bliss across their skin with deft finger strokes: here teasing, almost touching, just a tingle, then gone; there lingering, languishing softly in luxurious anticipation; now rushing roughly, sacrificing subtlety, cradling them as their cries crescendo, and letting the final line drift away, draped like wrinkled bed sheets at the end of the bed, the bottom of the page. The shape of a memory.

He never stays to watch the petals wilt. He leaves them with poetry, and not with pain.




(Originally written for Lily Childs' Friday Prediction)