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 204, of 240 so far.

The Bridge

I can see for miles out towards the horizon, over the dark blue waves. The sea is always in motion, but out there, it seems still.

Not so on the beach here, though. My son runs from point to point without rest, cheeks flushed, his grinning lips bright even under the cloudy sky. There are shells to be found, and the tide to be taunted, and so much imagined jetsam to be inventoried and extrapolated upon.

I was on a beach like this, once. Probably many times. I’m much older than I was then, but recently I’ve grown a little younger because that’s what happens to parents. A child temporarily grants their mother and father just a fraction of the blinding light of their youth; a Darwinian gift of insurance, given without knowledge or intent. And so, at least every few minutes, I run too.

The wind cuts in over the waves, and my ears throb with the chill, but they don’t hurt. They would, if I was alone, but I’m with my child and so the world around me is the world of a child, where things mostly raise questions rather than posing problems, and where bad exists only as chiaroscuro for good, and where evil is yet undreamed of.

“A pigeon!” he shouts, pointing at a gull, and I nod and smile. This world is his, not mine, and his simple and robust taxonomy is sacrosanct within it. Then he runs once more.

When the tide comes in, it’s a river. When the sand lies in a mound, it’s a hill. Any small creature on the beach is either a crab or a fish or a worm. And anything that can be collected is of course treasure. I find that I’m not only charmed and delighted by the nomenclature, but that I privately agree with it. In the enthusiasm and wonder of his age, he has given me the use of his eyes, too.

All at once, and only through the window of memory, I see another boy on another beach, with another father. The boy is me, and the father is mine, and the gulls are also pigeons, with all the rest of it. I’ve thought about this day many times over the years, but today is different.

Today, I see the boy that I was from an external perspective, running on the sand just as my own son is doing even now, and I find that I can feel the same overwhelming, unquenchable, avaricious, all-encompassing love for this child, too. I see his form and I know that it was my own, but now it seems perfect. I hear his voice as he shouts to his father — also mine — and to me, it is music. He turns so that I see his face in my mind’s eye, and I find it beautiful.

I shift my attention to the memory of my father, chasing after a child just as I am, and for the first time I can see that he, just like me, was struggling through on instinct, making it up as he went along, feeling like a child himself and unprepared for the responsibility, but also discovering joy in it, and finding a knack for parenthood because at its core, it’s only really the act of loving someone more than you even knew you could love someone before. Everything else follows from that centre, and quickly becomes intuitive.

Suddenly, the inscrutable man becomes transparent, and I feel a new type of kinship. It was sitting there all along, but I couldn’t see it because I hadn’t yet experienced that role myself. He was young, I realise; younger than I ever knew him to be. Younger even than I am now.

I look at my son just ahead of me, digging a shell from the sand with unfettered glee on his small face, and I feel two new things at once.

First, I hope that I haven’t deprived my son of my presence in future, by being a bit older as a father than my own parents were. And second, I wish that I could pull back the immutable curtain between the world of memory and the world of reality, so that I could wander up to my father on this beach, he as he was then and me as I am now, and strike up a conversation as two fathers of young boys. I realise that we have something in common that we didn’t before, and that it was in fact always the root of our relationship.

Perhaps a part of him was waiting for me to realise. Perhaps he had the same thoughts about his own father in turn.

“Another shell!” my son calls out, holding it aloft encrusted with wet sand for me to see. I tell him that it’s a great one, and we can take it home with us as a gift for his mother. He is delighted with the idea.

Another flash of memory, of seashells on my own mother’s dressing table, and I see that everything runs in circles, going around and around, passing from life into memory, and then back again in a new form. My son puts the shell in his pocket and begins to run again, and I quicken my pace, unsure if I’m seeing him or my younger self leaving small — and perfect — shoe prints on the sand.

I see my childhood from the perspective of a parent. My own son’s eyes are the bridge to the second half of my youth, hidden from me until I had a child of my own.

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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