This is what comes of going for a run while you're desperately trying to think of this week's flash piece, and hearing strange noises. Some of which were probably just my joints objecting to the exercise...
Tempus Fugit (997 words)
Before he finished the first circuit Terry’s hip was grinding with pain. He had reached the far corner of the athletic ground, where the bushes grew densely below the railway embankment. Then he heard a sigh; smelled a brief waft of something sweet.
Young’uns, smoking dope, probably feeling each other up. Plenty of them around, kicking a ball about, showing off for a girlfriend on the sidelines. Girls playing these days, too; he tried not to be obvious about looking. A pretty arse could still brighten his day, but he didn’t fancy being beaten up for it.
He wasn’t, refused to be, some Daily Mail knee-jerk old fool who thought all the young were villains; but he did get angry at the ones who just seemed to hang around, looking threatening, wasting time that they’d never have again.
On the second circuit he caught the scent again. He slowed without realising. A throat-catching sweetness that made him think of religion, or mystery. He wondered where that had come from. He wasn’t even a lapsed Catholic; wouldn’t know what church incense smelled like if he sat on a censer.
Sometimes he wished he was religious. It had been a rotten week; an old friend had gone into a nursing home. Terry was working up the courage for a visit, dreading the smell of baby powder over pee and the bemused and whimpering occupants.
The third time around, he caught the same scent, and a sound; maybe a sob.
This time, he stopped, pressing his hand to his hip, half-glad of the excuse. “Who’s there? Who’s messing about back there?”
Whispers. His spine chilled, but he walked forward into the green darkness, cursing himself for an old fool.
There were two of them, a boy and a girl. Both inhumanly beautiful, like the Taj-Mahal or the moon, gowned for a costume party. “Who?” Terry said.
“Hello,” said the girl. She had silver bells on her gown, and in her voice.
“Hello,” said the boy. A golden voice, summer flowers, glades filled with light.
“Who are you?” Terry managed.
“We’re…” they looked at each other, and back at Terry. Their movements had a languid dreaminess. “Visitors,” the boy said. “From across the ferny brae.’”
“Tell me, why do you run?” said the girl. “We see you, running, but you just go around, then you go away.”
“To stay fit,” he said absently. The phrase about the ferny brae reminded him of something. He wasn’t afraid; they were frail-looking, small, and seemed half-asleep.
“Fit for what?” said the boy.
Terry laughed, abrupt and bitter. “Wish I knew. Trying to hold old age off as long as I can.”
“But you’re already old,” the girl said.
“Yeah right. I want to stay active, is all. Not that it makes any difference. Age is a bastard. You’ll find out, if you stop smoking whatever you’re smoking long enough to live past fifty.”
“Smoking?” They looked puzzled.
“Why is age a ‘bastard’?” said the boy.
“It hurts. Everything stops working. If you’re lucky you go out like a light, if not, you end up dribbling your days away, not knowing your own name. Enjoy your youth while you can. You youngsters seem to think it lasts forever, but it doesn’t.”
He realised the girl was crying, tears slipping like silver down her perfect pale skin. “Hey, don’t,” he said. “You got years yet.”
“Yes,” said the boy. “We have years. Endless years before us and behind us; and we cannot change. We are as we are, and all that happens is that we thin, and fade. We have no children to carry the future, only a past that lies on us like lead, crushing the sunlight, silencing laughter.”
He got it, finally. “You’re…what? Fair folk? Fey?”
The boy shrugged. “If you will.”
“And you don’t age?”
“No. And there have been no children for so long…” the girl looked out at the field, where a young man with dreadlocks was shepherding eight or nine small children into a noisy game. Her face showed almost no expression, but her ache echoed in Terry’s own chest.
“And you can’t die?”
The two of them linked hands. “Only by iron, and it takes more courage than we have,” the boy said.
He brushed Terry’s cheek with a long, cool finger. “You,” he said, “you are so beautiful, do you not know it? It is your briefness makes you so.”
“You burn so bright and fierce,” the girl said. “You blaze.”
“Hah.” Terry looked down at his hands, rivered with blue veins. “Beautiful, eh? Well, there’s a thing.” He looked up at them. “Can you make me young again? Sprinkle me with fairy dust?”
“No,” said the girl. “We could only make you last longer.”
“Don’t ask,” the boy said. “Please.”
“Fairy gifts come with a price, don’t they?” Terry said.
“Always.”
“Well then.”
Terry was never sure how long he spent there, talking. Nor sure what was said. Only that he left feeling touched with mystery, feeling winged with joy and drenched with a profound sorrow that was almost sweet.
#
He kept running as long as he could, though he never saw them again. He visited his friend, and took an old book of fairy tales, and read them aloud, while the nurses gathered in the doorway, listening.
Terry died, in the end, swift and clean, collapsed on his kitchen floor while he made tea.
The trains continued to rumble along the embankment, and in the bushes, the scent of somewhere else still hung. Two pairs of eyes watched the playing children grow, and the children after. Eventually the athletic ground was dug up and boxy houses grew where the bushes had been. One morning, the driver of the 8.15 froze in his seat, thinking he’d seen two figures on the line, standing with their hands linked, but when the train reached them they blew away like smoke, and the iron wheels pounded on, into the future.
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