Yesteryear Fiction

Feather
By Andrew Carpenter


She reaches out to touch the sky, and as her hands lose themselves in the blue, I smile. A feather floats in on the wind, light and downy. I catch it in cupped hands, blow gently, kindle the flame there.

“This is our love.” I say to her, and as I open my hands, she sees the feather, brilliant and golden. Light flashes and flickers as it shifts into a gilded flower, shivers, then floats away on the wind again.

“Where will it go?” She asks, and I smile back.

“Wherever we choose to take it.”


- - -
I am a fleeting moment in your mind. Next time you stop to smell the roses, realize that one of them might be me.

Not The King’s Child
By Andrew Carpenter


I stand at the base of the throne and try not to look up, try to avert my eyes. I know what is coming. I know what my sentence, my punishment must be. This is my trial, and yet my fate has already been decided. There is only one punishment for interloping with royalty, for polluting the king’s line with the seed of my own lowly peasant family.

Solemn, heavy with child, the queen lays my fate out in ink and on parchment held over my bowed head, masks her tears with a pale hand. I close my eyes. One word passes her lips.

Death.


- - -
I am a fleeting moment in your mind. Next time you stop to smell the roses, realize that one of them might be me.