Flash Fiction Fr-aturday – The Next Time

Wow, it’s been so long since I posted a flash fiction piece last. It isn’t even Friday but hey… I’m back! Hope you enjoy it.

The Next Time

I understand now. I always wondered, as a child, why people used to see fairies dancing across the misty fields and I never got to see any. But now I know. It isn’t because modernity chased away superstition, or because people stopped going outside. No—it’s because the portal closed.

It must have happened some time when my great grandmother was young, because she remembers seeing them. She’d tell me about it often, before she passed. How beautiful they were, how sad she was when they stopped dancing. She never understood why they disappeared. Of course she didn’t. She didn’t know about the portal.

This time around, everyone knew about the portal. It was all over the news, but most people were confused. Ghosts, they called them, or spirits. Angels, the more religiously leaning claimed, or demons. Aliens, a loud minority insisted. But something deep inside me recognized them. Every day, before the sun rose, I went out into the fields to wait for the morning mist, to watch them dance. Even though the portal was only open for a few months, I can still see them. I know they’re not really there but, their image is sealed in my mind, the swirl of their skirts, the sweep of their limbs. 

Every morning I go out and I see them in the mist, even as it sits without motionless over the fields, slowly evaporating as the sun climbs higher. Every morning I wonder… Will I still be here, the next time the portal opens?

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