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 268, 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.

Exile

The old man sat on the stone bench near the fountain, looking towards the small park across the square. It was his customary place on a Sunday morning, for the last twenty years or more, and he was accepted there as a part of the tableau. The old, he had come to learn, could more readily aspire to be society’s scenery than its characters. An easier role, with a lower barrier to entry, but also far less rewarding.

There were children playing football in the park, as usual at this time of year. It was an organised thing, each team with their colours, and earnest adults watching and exhorting. The old man cared little for the sport, but he knew its social power as a target for energy, and a conversational currency, so he tried to at least feign interest.

The city was his home now, but it would never be home to him because it was not his own. It was in a warmer country, and it had all the strangenesses of a foreign place. The license plates on vehicles, and the sound that the pedestrian crossings made, and the colours of police cars, and the stickers on shop windows, and the street signs, and the brands of foods, and the shapes of the bins, and a thousand other small things that were superficially recognisable but different from what he knew. They all marked him as an outsider, and distanced him from his environment. They all reminded him that he was not from here.

The sirens of ambulances, and the announcements on trains, and the opening hours of shops and venues. All different. The ubiquitous air conditioning with its chemical smell, and the bottled water, and the statues of men who meant nothing to him. The whole thing had the air of a performance of civilisation, modelled on his own and meant in tribute, but falling short on research and thus getting too many details wrong. A foreign land, in your most secret heart, would always be a cargo cult of your own.

The city didn’t care, of course, and nor did the country. Both had existed for just as many centuries as his own birthplace, more or less, and normality was just a matter of what you were accustomed to. Here, it was narrow pavements, and reeking cigarettes, and the omnipresent waspish whine of motorscooters by the thousands. And the smell of the drains, and the spiced meats, and the dark roast coffee. The street policemen, split into fat little generalissimos and rake-thin, mournful-eyed boys who looked like passport officers behind a desk at the airport.

All of the same roles, and the same features, and the same functions. But different.

The old man sighed. He had made a conscious effort to wear the same clothes as the locals, and to adopt the same habits and schedules, and he was ethnically similar enough to a great many of those who had been born here, but still he somehow carried a neon sign proclaiming him as a foreigner, always drawing a curious and suspicious eyebrow from whatever flavour of busybody was passing by. They would nod politely when he caught them looking, and he would nod in return and even smile, but few would speak. It had been the same in his own country, of course, but then his role had been the opposite and so the whole scenario was not at all comparable.

When you got right down to it, there were generally two types of immigrants, when they were in a country by choice. There were the stowaways, whether legally present or not, who sought to recreate a pocket of their distant home; the ones who drew little sub-boundaries within the larger boundaries on maps, silently declaring their domicile or their neighbourhood as foreign soil. The stowaways sought only a where, and clung fiercely to the prior who and what.

And then there were the houseguests, who aggressively assimilated, naming their children with local names, participating in community programmes, and generally becoming model citizens as visibly as possible. These people wished not simply to reside, but rather to belong, even though they knew that it was ultimately impossible in the way they wished to believe. True belonging, as everyone knew, came from trying only moderately hard whilst not really needing to; anything else was conspicuous and disdained.

It was a matter of debate regarding which of the two positions most betrayed a deep insecurity, but there was also a third category: the scattered few who had been ejected from their own country forever, and had settled for another out of bare necessity, just like the old man. He had long since given up dwelling on the circumstances and justifications surrounding his fate, because it was intractable, and he lacked the energy to power indignation and fight and fury. With age, anger became sorrow, and resolve became resignation. It was a matter of survival.

There was a cheer from the park, and he saw that a goal had been scored, with the boy who achieved the feat now running back to the opposite end of the shabby pitch, his grinning teammates flocking after him. Their soft faces were unmarred by time, or stress, or fear, or illness, and they could surely belong to any place they chose — and be accepted there by sheer virtue of their unassailable vigour and potential. Once again, the old man sighed.

The young people, like these, were the worst part, for reasons he didn’t fully understand. They had been here for less time than he had — indeed, they had been alive for less time than he had been resident in the city — but because they had been born here, it was theirs, and they were at home. The old man’s longer tenancy afforded no advantage over birthright, and the young saw him as more of an interloper than their own elders did. A curiosity, with inscrutable motives, because after all who would ever choose something that was already ordinary to them?

When the old man thought about it, as he did often, he wondered if perhaps it was their very youth that was so vexing. The greatest gift anyone is ever given, and which is given to everyone, but without the complementary ability to appreciate it. Youth, like wealth, was offensive when gratuitously displayed.

In this, too, he stood in isolation, for his youth had long departed. Perhaps he held that status in every single aspect of his life, but this one in particular was cruel, for it robbed him of the possibility of any change. A short future, diminishing vitality, with all prospects behind him. If he was still a young man, then perhaps there would be hope, but time had shut its doors on him too, hiding away the kingdom of youth and its optimism and opportunity.

Being an exile was like growing old, as your first and truest home became more like a memory than a real place.

Cast out, and forbidden ever to return. But always yearning.

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.

Find Out More

I'd love to hear any feedback or other thoughts; you can find my contact info here.

I encourage you to share this story with anyone you think would enjoy it. If you’d like to receive a tale like this via email every week, you can sign up to receive them here.

Thanks for reading.