Today's #flashfiction #TheManFromHarringtonStreet

“Who's on first?”

Babe Ruth* #quote

Looks like CJ is coming over this weekend. If he hadn't I probably would have invited over Dracula. Him and I go way back, but he always insists on parties that go late into the night and I can't do that. Anyway onto the flash fiction!

The Man From Harrington Street

         You know those movie plots where the main character gets amnesia and nobody can identify them? Where conveniently they can't find their fingerprints in the system, no DNA records either, no ID. Nobody can identify them at all. Even when their face is put all over the news! Well that happened to me. With no name the my doctors named 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 the way it will end, knowing that I will soon live a good life, give birth to a wonderful girl, and save her every single time than I'm happy with it. ”