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’ve also published several ebooks and compendium volumes of those stories so far.

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.

Here's story 194, of 240 so far.

It Will Come To You

The boy didn’t understand much of it. As for the small part that he did understand, he pretended that he didn’t, until pretending was no longer an option.

His mother was filled with patience and concern, somehow, even though she was also filled to the brim with grief. She gave him as much time as she could, and she didn’t lose her temper with him, and she remained firmly focused on the fact that her loss of a husband was also her son’s loss of a father.

The boy didn’t understand, but he knew nonetheless, in the quiet chambers of the heart where the worst things dwell. He knew that the simplest parts of his day, the most mundane parts, the parts to always be taken for granted, were now beyond a barrier of memory that he couldn’t breach. They were the Way Things Had Been, and they would never again be the Way Things Are.

Blurred, hallucinatory days became languid weeks merging into one another, and then finally months started to pass once more. Just one, at first, and then two, and then three and six and ten. Before he knew it, a year was gone, and it seemed like all their progress was erased on the day that was the anniversary of it, when everything became sharp again, and a year collapsed into an hour, and his mother cried from dawn until dusk. But that day, too, passed.

The boy became an older boy, his mother valiantly playing both roles as best she could, and the boy did his part by allowing her to. There was anger, and there was sadness, and there were times when he would find her sitting quietly and looking at something in her hand; something he couldn’t quite see. Those moments seemed to be important and secret, and so he didn’t intrude, and accepted curiosity as the cost of his mother’s privacy.

The boy, older still, had his curiosity suddenly satisfied on the day before he was to leave their home at last, and travel away to continue his education. His mother took him aside and sat him down, and then drew something from her pocket, clasped it in her hand tightly for a moment, and then opened her fingers to reveal a small stone, like a pebble, worn smooth and shiny by untold hours of handling. It was unremarkable, but she held it with reverence, and then with something very like regret she pressed it into his hand and told him that it had been a gift to her from his father, on the day they had met, when they both happened to be at the same beach.

Hi father — only a young man, then — had told her that the stone must be able to grant wishes, because he’d picked it up and wished that he’d meet a beautiful girl that day, and there she was. The boy’s mother laughed as she told the story, and the boy smiled, glad to see the brightness in her again. He took the stone reluctantly, even begging her to keep it, but she insisted that it should be his. Perhaps he’d meet a beautiful girl soon too, she said, and despite his age he had blushed and dropped his gaze.

Away he went, and the first months flew by, and then a year. The second year went just as quickly, always with regular trips home to see his mother, and sometimes she came to see him too. They spoke often, and when his graduation came around, she was there with pride on her face and tears in her eyes. She told him how proud his father would have been, and then they both had tears in their eyes. Beneath the graduation gown, safely in the pocket of his suit trousers, he had the stone.

More years went by, the boy long ago having become a man, and sometimes he would rise to get ready for work and would glimpse his father’s face in the mirror, looking back at him. There was a sadness about it, but there was also comfort. He told his mother once, and she confirmed that he looked very much like her husband had at the same stage of life.

The man — who, like all men, had once been a boy — had good years and bad, triumphs and sorrows, and through it all he tried to be as good a man as he remembered his father being. He did find a beautiful girl, and they fell in love, and he told her all about his father. He introduced her to his mother, and they bonded in the way that good women do when they love the same man but in different ways, and they were a family.

The man’s mother grew old, and though she didn’t have much time remaining, she was as happy and bright as she always had been, because she was certain that she would once again be with her husband, after so many long years apart. The man who was her son took care of her, always keeping the stone with him, but he let life take its own course, never having uttered a single wish with it clasped in his palm. He had only ever thought of a single one, and to make it would be to invite the unpalatable possibility that the stone was just a stone. With his silence, the possibility of its magic was preserved.

On the day when his mother passed, he went again to the beach where his parents’ story had begun, alone against the protestations of his own beautiful girl, because he needed time to look back. The beach was all but empty, cold and windswept, but fresh, and real, and there.

The man crouched down and ran his fingers over the wet sand, then he reached into his pocket and took out the stone. For a brief moment he considered throwing it far out over the waves, but instead he clasped it tightly.

“I wish they were still here,” he whispered.

“Who?” came the bright voice from nearby, and the boy frowned, casting around for the answer that had been at the front of his mind.

“I… I can’t remember,” he replied, feeling suddenly foolish.

There was silence for a moment, and then he felt a heavy hand on his shoulder.

“It will come to you,” his father said.

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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