“I love you,
you love me, we're a happy family!”
Atilla the Hun*
Well not much
happened today besides the usual writing though I also am
brainstorming a little flash fiction series. It's going to run an
entire week. (Mon-Fri) Every single story will be independent of
itself and pretty standalone but will all merge into a series. Kinda
like a TV show. It'll be done so you could actually read like the
third one alone and still enjoy it. But the best would be to read
them all in order. Once I do it I'll go back to my completely
different story each day. I'm quite excited with what I've come up
with so far. Oh, regarding the Mon-Fri I know many of you are not
American like me(since this is the great magnificent world-wide
Internet of awesomeness) so yeah adjust to your timezones I guess!
Anyway I do hope I have it ready in time for next week. Anyway onto
today's flash fiction!
The Man From
Harrington Street
You know those
movie plots where the main character gets amnesia and nobody can
identify them? Conveniently they can't find their fingerprints in
the system. No DNA records either. No ID. Nobody can identify them.
Even on the news! Well that happened to me. They nicknamed me
Harrington based on the street they found me near.
But there is
one terrible difference for me. I didn't completely have amnesia. I
was left with one memory. One terrible memory. It wasn't scary in of
itself. It was a party. A wedding party. My wedding party. The bride
was beautiful. I remember all the faces perfectly. With the help of
the police we were able to sketch all the faces I remember. They
couldn't identify any of those people either. They eventually said
that being unable to identify me was understandable. But all those
people at the party it must have been some dream I had when I had the
trauma of whatever caused my amnesia. I did have a massive head
injury. It may have been a massive accident.
It just felt so
real. So now I had a life I knew must have been real, lost forever.
Everyone there looked so happy, including the bride. I had such a
sense a loss. I didn't know who she was, but she must have been
special right? I didn't know what I had lost. But it must have been
special because I also saw how happy everyone else at the party
looked.
I worked for a
long time to discard that life. I worked in a simple store while
putting that memory away. In fact I even fell in love with a woman
that looked nothing like the bride in the memory and married her in
Hawaii our wedding party on the beach instead of inside a house like
it was in that memory that I was now convinced was a delusion like
the police said. It took many years but I decided that no matter how
real it felt it must have been fake.
We had
children. One beautiful girl and one tough boy and we raised them
happily. I worked my way up to being manager of the store. My wife
wrote even with the wailing of children and watching them. Usually
she would just type a paragraph between each time she changed a
diaper. And when they got older since she had a laptop she would
write while between each and every sentence she looked up to see
exactly what the children were doing.
Then one day
something happen once again. On my daughters wedding I saw the memory
unfold. All those years I was wrong. The memory from my amnesia was
not my wedding party, it was hers. I had put away the memory for so
long during my life with my wife I had not realized that all these
people were my wife's family and their friends and my own friends.
I then saw that
next to my daughter this little blue light appeared. I ran to her. I
knew something was up but I didn't know what yet. Then the light
opened up into some big swirling portal-looking thing, like you see
in all those science fiction movies. The thing moved straight at her
but she could hardly move out of the way in time.
Except for the
fact I pushed her out of the way.
And the thing
then touched me. And I was dragged into like a dog on a leash. In a
quick moment I was at Harrington street where they found me. I saw
the thing behind me vanishing. I wondered if it vanished at the
wedding party. I started to realize what was going to happen as I
started to forget things. I then noticed that all the wrinkles on my
body had gone away. I plucked one of my hairs and noticed that it
wasn't gray. I looked around. It was fall. It was fall when they
found me and my daughter's wedding party was in spring.
I laughed with
some tears. "I was right when I was first found. I did lose a
wonderful life." As I spoke I could feel the memories I had
gathered after my amnesia fading. "If this is a kind of death I can
die knowing that I will soon live a happy life, give birth to a happy
girl, and save her every single time."
This work is
copyright Langdon Kennedy you may share this(email it, print it, post
it on your own website, broadcast it etc.) work unaltered as long as
you credit me as the author and share a link to this blog with it and
it is not for profit. If you have any questions and/or are unclear of
these conditions email me at llkenne1@asu.edu
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