Setbacks
A Short Story for STSC Symposium: Fiction
This story is my submission Soaring Twenties Social Club's Symposium. The STSC is a small, exclusive online speakeasy where a dauntless band of raconteurs, writers, artists, philosophers, flaneurs, musicians, idlers, and bohemians share ideas and companionship. Each month we create something around a set theme. This month, the theme was “Fiction". Consider joining us.
Mar hesitated before stepping across the swale. It was bricked in from either side and if she stepped on a brick it would fall loose and the gurgling water within would rush her down back into the jungle again. It had taken her many years to return to the glass house and she did not think she could manage another setback.
She took a deep breath, and jumped across the swale. She more than cleared the bricks — after all, the entire gap was only about a foot wide at that point. Still she felt unsteady on her feet, as if the grass underneath would suddenly turn to brick and the brick would turn to swale and the lawn would turn to jungle. Everything these days happened quickly and then lasted years at a time.
It was disheartening to see him again. Frozen there as he had been before, reaching across the table in the same suspended animation. Like a paused videotape: somehow less definition than if he were legitimately sitting still. Her brain kept expecting the reach to finish before she could see the whole of him and thus refused to translate all the signal her eye was sending. The frozen always had this vertigo effect.
As of what she could see, it was not good. Farrow was definitely still alive. However, years of being frozen had allowed some infections and decay to set in. Along his face and his arms bacteria had eaten away at skin. Fungus grew at folds under his chin, between his fingers, seemingly replaced his fallen-out teeth. In his waxy hair, green algae. A human without movement becomes moldy.
At the table sat another frozen, this one a woman and far more fresh.