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.

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Here's story 218, of 240 so far.

Still Looking

He parked the car in a place he’d parked it a hundred times before, or maybe a thousand.

The lines painted on the road had changed, and the parking meter had arrived at some point in the last decade, but the buildings were the same, and the road sure as hell was the one that had been there since before the city had electric light.

Stepping out to stand on those old streets again was always like being assaulted by the past. Memories ran right up and knocked into him, clustered together like a mob, but their embrace was like water in the desert, or like regaining the surface of the sea and gasping in sweet oxygen after being submerged. It was a handsome city in places, including this part of it, and it was also ugly in plenty others, but it was home.

At least, it had been home once upon a time, an impossible number of years ago, and the instant familiarity of it all belied the appalling gulf of time since then. He shook his head, but there was a smile on his face. The smell of it all reached him too; cigarette smoke and fried food and curry and petrol, and always the recent rain. It was beautiful all on its own, an olfactory symphony for a tough place, packed with spirit and fight, desperation and defiance, and the omnipresent sarcastic humour that was written in the blood of the natives.

He had rented a flat for a few nights, as had become his custom in recent years. It had been hotels before, and there was no shortage of those now, with so many grand old buildings that had once been home to scores of families now turned into resting spots for tourists. A private base of operations was preferable, even if it belonged to someone else, and he only ever stayed for a handful of days. Just enough to walk the old beat, and to look.

If he was honest with himself, and that was an activity that was somehow easier here, he had to admit that his pilgrimages were foolish, and were only getting increasingly so as the years rolled on. He had fewer of those ahead now than he had behind him, and it had been decades since he’d seen her. He’d been a young man — a child, really, when he thought about it — and full of visions of what his life would hold. One of the visions, and the backdrop to plenty more, had involved her. It had never come to pass.

He’d had a life in other places, with other people, and he still had a life made out of disconnected parts of those, and even though he lived in another city he’d made an annual trip here ever since he grew up enough to understand that life isn’t a rehearsal, and that things lost once are usually lost forever. That was when the real regret set in, and it was a panicky thing that had eventually congealed into melancholy. It was in that spirit that he made the visits.

Right here, on this corner, was where he’d last seen her. It would have been, what? Thirty-four years ago? Surely a mistake, but also not. A fact, no matter how unacceptable. They’d said their goodbyes, in a time before people could stay in touch without trying to, and that had been it. It hurt them both, he’d always told himself, but the only part he was certain about was his own feelings.

A bus beeped its horn, and the sound was new but the sentiment was as old as the city itself, and he smiled.

Glancing up and down the broad street, refined in its day, faded now but still beautiful, he saw the faces of strangers that were nonetheless familiar. Faces the same shape as his, who would speak the same way, and probably think and feel the same way too; the superimposed genetics of environment and upbringing. They were his people, and he was theirs, even if strictly speaking he was only a visitor here. But it didn’t matter where you lived your life; you could never truly be a visitor to your home. You could only return, and then go away again. Or not.

He’d stopped counting the number of times he’d come back here, just to look at this same block of this same street, hoping against all sense and reason that she might have had the same idea and come back, on the same hour of the same day, to look for him too. A child’s stupid dream, but perfectly reasonable in the small hours of the night once everything had started to ache and the world stopped being filled with potential, and then stopped being filled with foolishness, and instead started to be filled with fear.

He’d heard nothing from her for most of his life. Hadn’t ever found her online, even. It was just… well, it was just this city. Desperate and defiant; hope against reason. Laughing in the rain. Here, it almost seemed possible. Here, it felt like more than a chance in hell. So he kept coming back, and every time he would stand just here on this corner, older and smaller, but still looking.

Despite himself, he smiled again, because the city did that to him. Its character was somehow written in every brick, and every bit of graffiti, and every street sign, and on the expression of everyone going by. Maybe that was the other reason he kept coming back: to reassure himself that he still could.

The bus had circumvented whatever had drawn the driver’s ire, and it pulled in across the way, screeching and huffing as it stopped and settled. The sky had faded, and there would be rain soon — always — and so he sighed. The first watch of his ritual was complete, and the night ahead would be a long one, so he took his small bag from the car and locked the vehicle. He’d sort out the parking once he’d let himself into the flat.

Someone was smoking somewhere, and someone else was already drunk before dinner, and a dog barked, and a half-crushed drinks can rolled by in the wind, like a herald of the coming evening. It was all just about perfect, and it pierced him in the way that the city invariably did. He hefted his bag to his shoulder, and breathed it all in as the bus pulled away again. The place still held beauty even for those who were alone. Maybe especially for them.

When he looked across the street and finally saw her there, older but still the same and already staring at him with wonder and disbelief in her eyes, he found that he wasn’t especially surprised.

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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