Moments In Time: A Collection of Short Fiction (55 page)

“I know that.”

“Yes. I know you get it. You always have. That’s what is so frustrating!” I sighed and reached for the heels resting on the stage to my left. “Look. This conversation is making me dizzy and pissing me off. It’s going nowhere.”

“I’m sorry. Sincerely sorry. I’ll try.”

“Screw trying. You know what Yoda says: There is no try, only do or do not. So, which is it going to be? No more half-assed, half-way, bare minimum allowed.”

His hesitation was expected, so I slid the expensive black sequined pumps back over the whisper sheer stockings, one at a time, the heaviness of the end weighing down on me, almost suffocating. I had to get out.

“You’re impossible.” His words were another push on the door. It squeaked as he tried to push open what I was trying to close.

“Only because you’re so difficult! You make everything harder than it needs to be! I can’t do this anymore. So glad I was able to provide you with an amusing detour from your mundane details.”

I picked up my clutch purse and rose to my feet as gracefully as I could in the fitted black cocktail dress I’d worn to the cast party. I stood there, letting him see me, but still unsure if he was truly there or I was going insane. What did it matter?

“I thought you were my friend. I gave you my trust. I chose you, but if you won’t choose me, then the hell with it.” My chest rose and fell, painfully tight, my lungs felt as if the would splinter. I waited for him to say something that would make me feel better. When he didn’t, my eyes started to burn and my throat thickened. “I’ll miss you. A lot. I rips me open to admit it, but you know me; open book, word vomit…honest until it destroys me.”

“Yes, I know you.”

“Last nail in the coffin. Thanks for that.”

“I never meant to hurt you. I don’t know what else to say, other than I’m sorry.”

“Just stop talking. Stop saying it! Actions, remember?”

“I told you, I’d try.”

“Yeah, sure. You’ve said it before.”

My heels made hollow sounds on the wooden stage as I forced myself to walk quickly away from him. I inhaled deeply, my chest pained with the effort, feeling pathetic and silly to feel the loss of someone I wasn’t even sure existed.

Sadness shrouded around me, and would follow me…but he would not. He would let me go with his typical passivity; leaving it to me to make sure we remained friends…only this time I couldn’t do it…I wouldn’t do it.

I shook my head as first one, then another, tear fell onto my cheek. I angrily brushed them away as I pushed open the back stage door and stepped into the heat of the summer night, amplified by the breeze whirling off the pavement and concrete of the buildings.

I was left with one last unanswered question…

Which one of us was more unworthy?

I squeezed my eyes shut tightly. It didn’t even matter. The result was the same.

“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”

—Martin Luther King, Jr.

About the Author

Kahlen Aymes is an award-winning author of sizzling hot, deeply moving contemporary romance. Her books have reached #1 on the best-seller list at Smashwords, #2 at Amazon, and #23 at Barnes and Noble. She draws her readers in with snarky humor, the deepest love, and overflowing emotion. She lives near Omaha, Nebraska, with her daughter, Olivia, and their three dogs. Creative by nature, she enjoys the arts, music, and theater, and she loves to cook. But on any night at one a.m., you’ll find her holed up with her laptop, writing. Her BSBA is in Business and Marketing. She adores hearing from her readers, so don’t be shy.

Kahlen may be found on social media at:

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Books by Kahlen Aymes include:

The Remembrance Trilogy

The Future of Our Past

Don’t Forget to Remember Me

A Love Like This

After Dark Series

Angel After Dark

A companion short story to the Outlier series

by Daryl Banner

Edited by Daryl Banner

Though she came from the slums, she is now queen of a world far in our future. Ignoring the uprising that threatens her throne, she sets her focus on filling the hole inside her heart. But will she succeed before it’s too late?

Atricia Sunsong became Queen with one little lie.

In the Last City of Atlas, that’s how a King or Queen is made. She learned that fact even before she learned how to lace her boots, or where boys go when they die, or why women bleed. All of the Kings and Queens are made so with the unkind stuff of deceit, a smiling murder, a promise made one night—then savagely broken the next morning. When she was young and sweetened and her favorite thing in the sky was the sun, she swore she’d grow up to be a kind and honest woman, but was never sure to whom she was swearing.

There’s a light knock at her chamber door. “In,” says Queen Atricia, and a man is ushered inside. A man with muscles of a god, or so is indicated by the tight suit he wears. Not that he’ll be wearing it for long. His pants hug a hard-worked form down to the shin where, bunched up, they reveal two thick boots.
They get better and better with the men they offer,
Atricia thinks hollowly.

“Hello, your royal … uh …”

“Atricia,” she corrects him, not moving from the balcony at which she stands. “Just Atricia.”

For a second, he doesn’t seem to know whether to smile, cry, or wet himself. “They told me you didn’t prefer the formalities or, uh … titles. I wasn’t sure if they were kidding or not.”

“Even a Queen gets sick of words like ‘Queen’ …”

Now her favorite thing in the sky is nothing at all. Until it is vacant but the sickly moon and a pox of demon-white stars, she knows no comfort. The sun that used to smile and smile, now only draws sickness from her belly, sickness and memories of childhood and times when she preferred her morning juice sweet. Now she can’t even bare the sweetness of flowers.

She envies the people in the ancient histories she read about, people from a time long before the world was ruined. Now, there exists only the Last City of Atlas, surrounded by a Wall so tall it tickles the bellies of clouds, outside of which nothing but oblivion remains. In this bleak and long-progressed time, people no longer require sleep after the age of two; dreams are for babes who know nothing of how harsh the real world will greet them.
However did the Ancients, as grown and able adults, manage wasting eight hours a day on silence and stillness?—Don’t we get enough of it when we die?
Atricia wonders.

But it is not only the sleeping that confounds her of the Ancients … It is the lack of Legacies. For in this world, every person is born with a unique and special ability, and this ability is called a Legacy. Most abilities are lowborn, ineffectual, weak … Only the rare gifts that are potent enough can rise a soul from the deepest of trenches all the way to Queenship …

Says the man: “Should I undress, or …”

His age would be a total guess, really; he could be the likes of thirty, or he could be a well-groomed child. His youthful face and bright eyes, they don’t seduce the way a man’s might, but they will have to do.
What does it matter who or what you are
, thinks Atricia.
I’m Queen and Queens take what they want.
“No,” she says simply. “But you can make a seat of my bed.”

The wind feels cold against her face, standing here in the balcony of Cloud Tower, overlooking all the best and worst of the crystal spires and domes and twisted chrome parapets of the grand and privileged Lifted City—the city held up by two-hundred-and-two massive pylons, a city squatting over the slums below … the waste and ruin of criminals and commoners and other lesser things Atricia pretends not to know so intimately.

The man has taken his seat, and she hears him say, “I haven’t seen many beds. They don’t make them so commonly where I’m from … Can’t afford them down below, I guess. No need, anyway, seeing as babies aren’t really big enough to fill them.”

The wind feels cold and yet she lets slip her silken robe to the marble tiles at her feet. “There are other uses for a bed,” says the Queen. The icy steel of grey midmorning light can’t cut deeper than the loneliness that strangles her heart. She can’t even bring herself to shiver. Queen Of Ice, that’d be a more appropriate title for her, if only she had such a Legacy. Queen Of Cold.

She crosses the room, brings her body up to the man at her bed. He looks up, his eyes like a boy’s, and she wonders,
Are you him?
She pulls back his suit jacket, feels the firmness in his shoulders, his hard neck, the muscles that dance down a back.
Are you him?
She lets fall his suit and marvels, and the comforting stab of lust finds seat in her chest. She pushes him down, straddles his rippled stomach, and a single gasp issues from somewhere within him, a gasp of surprise.

“There are other uses for a bed,” he agrees.

They call her The Slum Queen instead. Only when they think she can’t hear, of course. They whisper it like ghosts in a long echoing hall.
Queen Of Rags
…
Dirty-Gold Queen
. Atricia is living proof that anyone, anyone at all, can become King or Queen of Atlas. Even a girl from the slums. Life below the Lifted City, down in the slums that holds up the Lifted City like a precious baby, held up and out of the vile cesspool of mud and crime and starvation below … that life taught Atricia all she needed to know about the human being.
The Tattered Queen … Queen Of Grime And Crime …
No matter the amount of coin in one’s pocket, a poor hand can betray and murder a friend as slickly as a hand wetted with riches. A penniless mouth speaks as many lies as a full one.

Her hands trace his flawless body, fingers jumping at his every hillside of muscle, down the peaks of his nipples at Mount Pec left, Mount Pec right …
Are you him?
She doesn’t smile as her hands cross the symmetrical hills of Abs, through the valleys of Hips to a Ridge of Intimate Lands.

His anxious boy eyes watch hers like he sees stars, and his lips part.

There was a boy in the slums, a boy who lived very close to her dwelling in the fourth ward. His name was Chole, and they both attended the same school, lectured to by the same professor who taught that all Queens and Kings were good, borne of pure hearts and souls. Chole’s hair was a messy pitch of night, his nose a button on a doll’s face. Big-lipped and with wide ears, he wasn’t the most attractive boy, but he was the nicest and he was Atricia’s best friend, and whenever they talked about their days, he’d always look at only her eyes and melt her from the inside out. Though their hands never touched for longer than seven seconds and their lips never officially met—even after their voices changed and hair sprouted from sensitive places—Atricia felt such adoration, and it lived in the strangest of places … her love for him festered in her lungs, hung on her shoulders, quaked in her knees.

Slum boy Chole had a common Legacy, a lowborn Legacy, some simple talent that involved being able to manipulate dust particles into little shapes. With a stirring of his fingers, he could encourage bits of dust or ash to come together, lift up off a surface and unite to form a thing. Tiny hairs could be included, bits of sawdust too … Atricia would smile excitedly as he made his silly
designs. “Trouble is,” young Atricia told him once at the lunch table, “only one touch of a breeze can tumble down your beautiful creations.” Just then, as if comically summoned, a small wind that couldn’t even unrest a paper napkin danced across their table, and his little dust-made creation—a figure of a beautiful queen—crumbled to nothing, twisted in an instant back to the pile of dust from which it was made, beautiful no more.

She never expected one day to find herself a Queen … made of dust or otherwise. Those little creations of dust queens he would make her, she thinks fondly and sickly of them. The tiny little dust queens.

See the dust queen I made you?
That’s what he’d say, proud as a boy trying to impress a girl.
See how she dances?

Chole always talked and talked of someday being King and making the great change. “I’d bring the Lifted City to the wards below, to the hardworking people and the trenches and the factories.” He smiled grandly as he encouraged his little dust sculptures together, painting his dream before their eyes. “I’d be a good King. I wouldn’t live in that stuffy cold thing in the sky, no way. I’d be one with the people … Isn’t that how it should be?” He forms another figure, a little king standing tall as a hand before them, proud and commanding, limbs of dust, hair of breadcrumbs, a face of pollen. “The Slum King.”

Another breeze passed by and the two watched, wide-eyed. As if by reflex, their hands clasped together … one, two, three seconds … their breath held … four, five, six …

Seven, and the little king fell.

Their fingers let go.

Atricia knows this man that was brought in for her, he did not dream of this moment. It is not desire that catches in his eye when he sees her, but fear. He will be happiest when he’s collecting his payment, ushered back to his life, released like some captured bird. And what does that make her? The cage? The net in which he struggles? The clasping hands of a child to a precious feathered thing?

“Look in my eyes,” she commands. He obeys. “What do you see?”

He smiles like a drunken fool.
He plays the part well, I’ll give him that.
“I see a beautiful woman. I see a strong woman. I see … I see …”

“Do you know what my Legacy is?”

His forehead screws up, lips parted. “I … uh … Is this a trick question? Of—Of course I know your Legacy. The whole of Atlas knows it.”

The whole of Atlas
thinks
they know it.
She took the throne with one little lie, didn’t she?

“That means you will tell me true?” she says, like a warning.

This brings him to pause. With him straddled, she can feel his pulse quickening. She sees evidence of his tension in even the subtlest of flinches through his muscled torso. Something about it gives her great glee … and equal disappointment. Why can’t a man simply speak their mind around her? Why must it always be a game?

The man finally answers: “You can make people see truths. And speak them.”

With the balcony open, the cool wind prancing through the room tickles her hair, runs like ice across their nearly-naked bodies. The smile she gives to his answer does not touch her eyes. “So I will ask again, without judgment, without recourse or consequence … Tell me true. What do you see?”

His eyes turn to glass.
He is afraid … He is terrified, as all men are terrified.
No one can misspeak to a Queen, as it can mean forfeiting their life. For a wrong answer, who knows?—She could toss him to the prisons for the rest of his days, or order an execution, or pitch his body to the flames for all anyone would know. She is the Queen, and the Queen does as she likes. And perhaps that is the cruelest gift the throne ever gave her.

If Chole had become King, this fear would not exist. A person wouldn’t cower, they would laugh with the King and share tea. But it is not Chole that fortune and circumstance touched, no … He is not the one whose body fills the cold and silent throne.

The Queen of Truths. This is her official name, because the whole of Atlas believes in the one little lie, that her Legacy is in making people see the truth. Everyone who stood before her saw a truth indeed: They saw that Atlas would fall without her reign, that they would be safe and live happier lives with her seated at the throne, that they would know a better world.

Every single person was convinced, but not because they were actually seeing the truth. They were convinced because
that
is her true Legacy: She could make anyone believe anything, with the simple will of her mind.

“So is it true that you love your Queen?” she whispers, speaking to him, into him, through him to his very nerve endings, to his body, to the synapses of his brain that judge yeses and noes … love or hate … choose or don’t choose.

Her Legacy reaches in with an ice-cold grip that no man can refuse.

This is when his eyes change. All pretense is released instantly, like some mad drug has taken over. With every single man that’s brought to her chambers, Queen Atricia hopes not to have to do this, but it seems no one can enjoy her bed without a little dose of her secret Legacy. Free will is an illusion, anyway … a pretty illusion of power, lust, and greed that, no matter your choices, lands you the same ill fate.

“Yes,” he breathes, his voice aquiver with the excitement of a schoolboy at last meeting his lifelong crush. “Please, yes. So, so much. Oh, please.”