#fff145

For @flashfictionfridayofficial #FFF145 Short and sweet (well, there might be a little sting in the tail) - barely long enough to qualify!

@tsarisfanfiction great prompt! (You made me write poetry!)

Thunderfam - I may expand on this and make it a fic one day!

Rise and fall. Rise and fall. Slow, even, peaceful. Baby brother is sleeping.

Rise and fall. Rise and fall. Breeze lifting, ebbing. Gliding through blue and white sky.

Rise and fall. Rise and fall. Waves rolling, breaking, back and forth across white sand.

Rise and fall. Rise and fall. Murmurs, voices. Words? Someone is calling his name.

Rise and fall. Rise and fall. Reaching, failing. Pain. So close, but so far away.

Rise and fall. Rise and fall. Too slow. Too shallow. Little brother is struggling.

The Tekbury

In the beginning we had lost all knowledge where we came from, but didn't care as our early beginnings were all about war and survival. Thanks to a singular person, their name sadly lost to time, a fragile peace began. With the peace began our search of where we come from.

We found ruins, older than our collective mind, telling stories about what might have once been, but also about what was lost the day we began and we started to think that we understood everything, feeling that getting to know more about the past might just hurt, or worse tell us we'd been the reason for the end of the old, we stopped all archeology and search for history.

It Is Tomorrow

For @flashfictionfridayofficial prompt 145 Rise and Fall

I will do it tomorrow.

It is to hard today.

That is what we tell ourselves when we try to rise

from a fall.

When it feels like everything is going wrong

That it is impossible to be put to rights.

It isn’t

One thing

Just do one thing

Change one thing

Clean one thing

It will be to hard tomorrow too

An easy trap to fall into

Procrastinating

Don’t

Because yesterday you said you would do it tomorrow

It is tomorrow

Today

Make that bed.

Take a few extra steps

Add some essential oil to the bath water

Simple steps to start to rise

Get up off the floor

Breath

Now again.

Yes, the fall hurt.

The breakup, job loss, health issue, death

It may feel impossible to start feeling better

I know.

Just one step

One thing

On change

[#FFF145 Rise and Fall]

For @flashfictionfridayofficial​

ok, so this may be a loose interpertation of the prompt, it’s all I could manage this day, of all days, the day of it all.

Words:  Just around a hundred

Content:  No warnings

(Written for @flashfictionfridayofficial​‘s prompt: FFF145: Rise and Fall. Not related to any of my other work! TW: mentioned character death. Title inspired by Medea’s ‘one day more’ speech. Enjoy!)

I asked you once if you could hear my breath.

             I asked because sometimes, it is as if I do not feel the expansion of my lungs. I feel the sting of the salt over seawater at dawn, I feel the night air hissing as it dashes against my face, I feel the faint bitterness of a river left to dry. But my own breathing? I open my mouth, take in a singular deep breath, and then forget again for another few moments.

             My sister wrote me a letter once, telling me to move on.

             I read it over a bridge. My feet dangled over the basin, the city lights dancing across the bay in little distorted flickers. It’s a strange kind of forgiveness, not that I could really explain it to anyone else. I forgave the water for refusing to bring me where I wanted it to, and in turn, the river forgave me for asking it to take me somewhere I was not to go. So, I sit over the bridge, feet bare so that my shoes don’t fall in, and take comfort in the nearness.

             The basin had no obligation to me, I feel the need to say at this juncture. It knew me for the child who had knelt at the grass by its edge, the youth who had taken comfort in the grass beneath my fingers and the wind in my hair, the teenager who learned the power of things that could not be defined or categorised upon a space that was not one, nor the other.

             I once wanted so much more, you know. Before all of it happened, and before I grew into a tired, sad excuse of an adult. I could have been more.

             If you’re reading this, I’m sorry I could not be there myself for your twentieth birthday.

             I wish she had just demanded that I let her go and move on. The worst part is the compassion. It’s bad enough when it’s the elements, who I trust only as far as I can feel. It’s worse to be offered compassion when I don’t deserve any.

             I’m so proud of you. You will never have disappointed me, no matter what you chose.

             I don’t know if she would have said the same if she knew that the world kept moving but I just… couldn’t. Not after I finally got out, not after I finally got the freedom we had fought so hard for.

             I raise my own hand to the soft golden lights of the bridge, examining it with a dispassionate eye. This many years on, you can’t tell that half my bones had to be remade, that my body was destroyed by a single terrible choice. It was luck, of course, but it was also skill and the kind of healing that few people would have access to.

             They say the empires rise and fall as ages pass. I’m sitting at the edge of an empire, a place still trying to reclaim what was lost to greed. And now, I can say that empires do not fall on their own. They must be made to fall. So now, I understand finally why she had to do it, why she had to close her eyes and hold her breath before she did it.

             I hope you forgive me. I hope you forgive yourself.

             I listened to the ringing of bells behind me as someone cycled over the bridge. You’re not supposed to. You’re supposed to dismount and push your bicycle over the bridge. I can’t quite bring myself to care though. I read once that back when the empire first fell, this offshoot of the river was so polluted that nothing could live in it. They introduced koi into the river after it had been purged of sewage. The idea behind it was that if the koi could live in the water, that meant that the river was clean enough to live in.

             Below me, I watch a tortoise splash its way through the dark mirror of the basin, past the collection of floating bottles and plastic bags at the edge of the river.

             Years after I had heard the story, I figured that it was cruel. If the river hadn’t been clean enough, the fish would have died. And the koi weren’t native to the waters here. How would you know if it was the pollution and not the water itself that killed the fish if they had died?

             Forgive a young woman for her aspirations. I realised too late that I never told you that you deserved more than to be like me. You are twenty now; I have no more advice for you about what it means to grow older than that. If you take nothing else away, remember that I love you. Remember that you deserve to choose whatever you want to do next. Remember that you deserve to be happy.

             And now look at what I’m doing. A washed-up adult who can’t figure out what she wants to do with the life her sister fought so hard for her to have. Was it wrong for me to have believed the old stories about water? My mother told me the horror stories about it early on, the ones about the ghosts that came out of toilets in old movie theatres. It was later that I found the stories, the ones where people passed through the water to beautiful things. Where women walked into the water and into kingdoms where they could be respected. Where they could be free.

             Go, my dear. If you have been moving ever since my death, this is my permission for you to stay still. If you have been still, this is my permission for you to move on.

             I stand. I sat at the highest crest of the bridge because it’s the final point that is not either one side or the other.

The programmer on new technology

Not everyone is interested in the past, and not all of us have refused to let it go. Bertram Haddon is one of these people. He is old, and I imagine he has a lot of stories he could tell if he wanted too.

He has invited me to his office which is located in the expensive end of the tech district in London. A lot of successful startups take up offices around Haddon's own.

I'm sorry but I can't offer you anything to drink. I usually don't have any of our kind over and I doubt you'd want a black coffee or a soda.

Haddon sends me half a smile and moves a pile of papers from one side of his desk to the other.

I've heard about your project. I think it's going to do some good for the new generations, and for the older ones too. It's not an easy task keeping up with old acquaintances. This might tell us if they are still out there roaming around.

There is a playful look in Haddon's brown eyes. His hair is pitch black, and there is a golden undertone to his skin. It seems out of place in the gloomy weather that has haunted London for the last couple of days. I send him half a smile before asking him the first question of the day.

Could you tell me what it is you do for a living?

I'm a programmer. Or a computer scientist. Or whatever they call it these days. The field is moving so quickly that it can be hard to keep up.

Haddon shakes his head.

I've been a part of the tech wave since its birth and I've been programming since programming was invented. Right now that doesn't mean a lot, there are other programmers who have been going for a long time, but give it a decade or two and I'll be the oldest person in the field.

The tech business is a field where youth is half your worth. And even if I look young, I haven't got the connections from university or college that most of the younger tech people do. Sometimes it's a problem, but I've got a good reputation especially with those who've been in the business a little longer.

What drove you to work with computers and computer programming?

Well, I've always had a fascination with machinery. They were way less advanced back in the days, but cockwheels and pattern recognition have always worked the same.

When it was first possible to program at home without owning seven acres of land to stash your computer, I was on. It was fun. Figuring out how a chain of ones and zeroes created an entirely new world. I programmed some rather successful games back in the late eighties early nineties.

Haddon falls silent for a while and I am just about to ask another question when he continues.

Most of us are so focused on preserving the past that we don't stop to appreciate the wonders of the present.

After walking the Roman Empire, I swore to myself that I would appreciate the small things in life. Not grieve the rise and fall of an empire that I would soon be the only one who knew the truth about Even in the time from it was built to it fell, the stories got twisted until they were nothing but tall tales.

Sorry about that, Haddon apologizes, that was kinda a detour.

Anyway, I came to realize that I really like programming and I had a flair for it so I kept going. And sometime around the millennium change, I started building spaces for our people on the web. Places that the humans had no access to; where we could be ourselves.

And what do you do now?

Well, mostly the same. Even though I do some public projects too. Fronts we show the humans when they search for more information. I was one of the programmers behind the Council's information page for the broader public. We worked on it for months before we went public, and let me tell you one thing– Haddon holds a dramatic pause –I've never seen a website get more traffic in the first twenty four hours than that one. I'm just glad the Council invested in a good host for their website or else it would have crashed within the first five minutes.

Do you know how many of your old forums are still up and running?

Well, I do maintenance on them from time to time. Update the code and such. Most of them are still thriving. Just because the Council decided to step out of the shadows doesn't mean that everyone else followed suit.

And honestly, some sides of our world are not meant to be shared with humans. You know as well as I that behind the mask we show the humans, we are as strange and monstrous as their tales have made us out to be.

We share a knowing look before I ask the last question of the day.

You said before that it's hard to keep up with old acquaintances. Do you think the internet will help us keep in touch?

Honestly? Haddon says, no. The oldest among us are too used to loneliness – no harm intended – and it's hard to get rid of old habits. I don't think I could get enough of us on the same forum for it to actually work, and we change names as often as other people change their underwear.

Although I would like to see what kind of handles people would come up with.

A smile tugs at Haddon's lips. When he stops smiling, his eyes fall on the computer screen and a deep sigh leaves his lips.

I'm sorry, but I have to go. I have a meeting in twenty minutes, and you know how the tube is at this time of day.

Haddon and I talk a little as we leave his office, but as soon as we step out into the street we part our ways. I watch for a moment as Haddon disappears among the other pedestrians before I set off into the crowd myself.