On Monday mornings, I send out a story via email: ultra-brief tales of 1,000 words or more, usually in genres including horror, science fiction, and the supernatural. Those stories collectively are called Once Upon A Time. I’d love to have you as a subscriber to the weekly free story. You can subscribe via email here. Unsubscribe any time, from the link in every issue.

You can also get the entire collection of stories as a set of epub files for your favourite reader device: an overall collection, and also genre-specific volumes!

Here's story 267, of 288 so far.

Please note: permission is expressly denied to input any part of the story below into a machine learning (ML) or artificial intelligence (AI) or Large Language Model (LLM) system in any form.

A Matter of Perspective

The meeting place was always the same, at least in terms of its location. The surroundings naturally varied over time.

As the first chill breeze of winter made itself known during the darkening early evenings of autumn, one date was marked in his calendar and his mind: September 21st. It was a respite, and something to look forward to.

The immortal arrived at the unremarkable clearing in the unremarkable forest, some twenty minutes’ drive from the city. It was a little before 02:00, and the moon was full, in a clear sky. Usually it was cloudy, so tonight the stars were a blessing.

As the hour changed on the screen of his smartwatch, the immortal felt the familiar static charge building up around him, and the night birds and insects abruptly fell silent. A moment later, the machine snapped into view, accompanied by a rush of warm air that was as pleasant as it was brief. A further moment, and the narrow doorway slid open.

He wanted to say that she hadn’t aged a day, but they both knew that she had in fact aged by precisely that amount. It had been a year for him — from one 21st of September until the next — but for her, they had last spoken just twenty-four hours earlier.

The time traveller smiled, and in the gentle upturn of her lips and the comfortable light in her eyes, the immortal saw and felt everything that was tragic and agonising about his own life. Oh to have accompanied her in her machine, and to simply step forward by an entire orbit around the sun. But the machine was for one person only, and calibrated solely for her; as unique a thing as the immortal himself seemed to be. For him, there were no shortcuts.

“How was your day?” the immortal asked, and by way of an answer she stepped forward and embraced him. It was an unhurried embrace, because she had seen him very recently, but she held tightly because she knew that he hadn’t seen her for four whole seasons. He knew that she couldn’t fully understand, but he also knew that she tried very hard to, and that was enough.

Their routine was a simple one, and it had persisted since they had met in this place, quite by accident, more than a century ago.

Or a little over three months for her, the immortal thought.

They would spend a full day together, from 02:00 on September 21st until just before the same time the following day, and then she would depart. She would rest, and spend a further full day in observation and study of what had changed in the world since the year before; making her endless notes and delighted analyses. And then she would rest again, before finally stepping into her machine once more, bringing her to the next September 21st, where they would be reunited for another twenty-four blissful hours.

The time traveller had always loved the junction between autumn and winter, particularly in her native France. The transitions of nature, and the cycle of death and rebirth, were what had given her the idea for her machine in the first place. Their meeting had been pure happenstance, and it was only the immortal’s keen instinct that made him return to the same place a year later. He had not been surprised to find her there, but she had been shocked at his leap of intuition. That had been a century ago.

The immortal was in love with her, in the way that only long absence punctuated by the bittersweet joy of brief togetherness could bring. He loved her as a man loves his wife of decades, and with a praeternatural understanding of the person that she was, and had been, and was slowly becoming. He had loved her long enough for his love to become a sort of testament; an adoration. When 02:00 on September 22nd arrived each year and she disappeared back into the gulf between years, sometimes he would weep for days.

The time traveller, for her part, intuited most of this as a woman does. She knew the strength of his feeling, and she knew the reason for it. She loved him too, in the bright and exciting way of a new romance only months in the making, and she was drawn to his breadth of experience and knowledge, and particularly the infinite patience and regard that radiated from him. It pained her to leave him every second day, because she knew that for him there were a year’s worth of lonely nights ahead, but she also knew that her own time on the earth was no longer than that of any other mortal. Their particular purgatory was a necessary one.

“My day was as interesting and productive as ever, my love,” she said, and the immortal smiled. His face never changed, but somehow, every few days his eyes held somehow both more sadness and more affection. “And how was your year?”

“Too long without you,” the immortal said, completing his part of their ritual exchange. “But living through it has been a small price to pay to see your face again.”

A shadow passed over his features, and the time traveller placed her hand upon his chest, wordlessly asking a question that he had already read from her eyes.

“I wish that my years passed by in a day,” he said. “How lucky I would be to never miss you as I do. Then, truly, I would be happy.”

The time traveller smiled again now, and this time it was full of a deeper affection which he knew would light fires of hope in his memory for decades to come.

“Luck is a matter of perspective, my love,” she replied. “For I wish I could spend every year full of days in this world, seeing things change so slowly. And how happy I am now to never be more than a day from being with you.”

The immortal took her hand, not able to speak again just yet, and the time traveller understood. She led him a short distance away from her machine, knowing it was best not to focus on it and the inevitable separation it would bring. Instead, she looked up through the canopy of dark leaves, and she was surprised and delighted to see a full moon in a clear sky.

Usually it was cloudy, so tonight, the stars were a blessing.

JINX

KESTREL face a new and terrifying enemy: an all-seeing mastermind who already knows exactly who they are, and many of their deepest secrets. Nothing stays hidden forever, and the line between privacy and liberty is razor-thin…

Book 3 in the KESTREL action-thriller series.

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