Friday Flash: Being Light

He looked down into the valley below, the river so far away it looked like a silver ribbon. As soon as he'd had the thought, it all looked like a model, tiny wire brush trees glued to the hillside, the painted backdrop of dramatic mountains and the impossible blue of the cloudless sky. Then once the set was in place, he felt like an actor in a film, camera just behind his right shoulder, strings playing in the background to emphasise the peace and quiet drama of his surroundings.

His right buttock had gone to sleep, he'd been sitting there so long. The last inch of his last cigarette was smouldering away between his filthy fingers. He tried to grasp some wisdom from the three months he'd spent at the monastery. There was nothing but a slight light-headedness and ache across his sinuses, probably from the altitude, and the craving for a double cheeseburger.

"Oh stomach," he sighed, looking down at the papery skin stretched between his ribs and belly button. "You betray me."

He laughed, the sound was alien to him. When was the last time he'd really laughed, really cried, really loved, really hated? He couldn't remember. All that chanting and crappy food had kept him in a fog and now there was no money left, nowhere else to go and no time.

The cigarette tasted stale; it had been in a tin at the bottom of his pack for months. He tried not to read too much into the fact that the last pleasure he'd saved for this day had turned out to be a huge disappointment.

Thoughts of London drifted into him with the smoke, taking him back to a time in pubs before smoking bans, beer and birds, karaoke until their voices were hoarse and tuneless. He wondered what they were all doing now, whether they were missing him. Out of sight…

Then he wondered what Tina was doing and the bitter taste of their last conversation battled with the cigarette. He did the most harm when he tried to do the most good. Perhaps some bit of him had always known that and had kept him steady on the path of mediocrity. Perhaps it was because Tina had stolen his goodness in the womb. He'd always suspected when he saw the scan picture of them wrapped around each other, imagined her ante-natal leeching before they'd even come into the world. That was why he'd driven all her partners away, poisoning the soil of her relationships before any love had a chance to grow there. He needed all her love for himself.

"Why are you telling me all this?" she'd shouted at him the last time they spoke.

"Because I need to confess the things I did wrong in my life."

"Why?" Her mascara tears were like little black comets, leaving long trails down her cheeks. "To make you feel better? Didn't it occur to you that I might not ever want to know this stuff?"

"No," he admitted. He'd been so caught up in the need to absolve himself, he hadn't thought about the carnage his emotional bombs would cause.

He stood there and took the abuse as she catalogued all the ways in which he ruined her life. He waited for a gap in the tirade but by the time it came he'd lost the will to tell her why he was there. All he felt was the need to leave and do what the dream had told him.

So he went to his friends and his mother and he confessed and he cried and he cut all his ties to his old life. And now, eleven months and thirty-one days later, the dream was still just as vivid. He didn't have to close his eyes to see her silver hair floating around her like she was underwater, hovering impossibly above his bed whilst he couldn't move. He'd done everything she'd told him to, then travelled the world and did all the things people talked about doing but never did, usually over a beer in the pub just before closing time when the melancholy set in.

And now it was here, the day he'd dreaded and the day he'd looked forward to in equal measure. He drew on the cigarette down to the filter and stubbed it out, burying the remains under a couple of pebbles.

He waited. A lone bird circled, effortlessly majestic as it caught the thermals. The sun sunk lower until it was speared by the mountain opposite him, but still, nothing.

"Come on," he muttered. His stomach twisted as he worried whether he'd got the wrong date, but he'd checked the day he left the monastery.

He remembered her promise. "Do this, and one year from now you will be free and you will be King."

He couldn't remember why he had believed her, it was as if he skipped that step and went straight from loser to future King without the need to question her in between. But now, as the wind felt cold and the shadows in the valley deepened, he was doubtful.

"You will be light," she'd said. "You will escape the shackles of the Earth and you will join me in-"

"Oh crap," he muttered, cutting across the memory. "It was just a bloody dream, wasn't it?"

He dropped his head into his hands, wanting to cry but there was nothing in him but a hollow shame. He'd destroyed his life. He'd destroyed his sister's life and what for?

She hadn't even said where he'd be King of.

He stood, looked down at the ribbon now black, at the wire brush trees, at the bird swooping down into the valley's mouth and he knew what he had to do.

Then he felt light. Then he laughed and then he cried. It was all so clear now.

He jumped. He flew. He was King of the air.

—

P.S. If you enjoyed this, then you'll love From Dark Places, my anthology of 25 dark short stories.