Fiction | Sci-Fi | Short Fiction | Flash Fiction
Ouzo, Bulls and the Umbra
Tourists and pilgrims from all over the Galactic Arm attend the sensualisms of the Bull Festival.
/1
Just in time for the Bull Festival, the Portal was finally up again, the Maintenance Guild having worked overtime under the sultry sun of a dying Summer.
And not a day too soon.
The opening groups of wide-eyed tourists and pilgrims started arriving the moment the bronze pipes and spheroids of the passaging mechanism cooled to their working temperature, exuding condensation and auspiciousness.
But it was not until the Taverner watched a convoy of merchants’ wives hurriedly depart for the upland villas with evergreen bonsai gardens that he knew Propriety was surrendering the venerated temples to the only crowd that could guarantee profit for the ancient city by the wine sea.
As he hears the first shrieks of the Bad Women flaunting the bulls near the Acropolis, the Taverner relaxes into a smile and cracks a bottle of ouzo.
/2
We arrived late, and I slept fitfully.
These spiritual journeys could really throw me off-kilter.
But my wife finds these events on worlds, steeped in tradition, quaint and consistent with the charter of her beloved action group for Muliebral Effectuation, and I am known to be a kept man. So there we go, hopping all over the Galactic Arm throughout the Terran year according to her strict event calendar, spending Daddy’s wormhole-building money.
This time around, the refrigerating pipes and spheroids of the Portal had clanged and whistled ferociously, and I was, for once, glad to set my eyes on the antiquated cobble-stoned alleys, pillars and temples where the mighty bulls of the Mercantile Helladists are wielded and applied by the visiting zealots.
After gracing me with a peck on the cheek at breakfast’s conclusion, she left from the auberge in a hurry to join her loud and merry party of women, bent on terrorising the unfortunate male bovines all day and half the night above the shimmering sea.
These journeys could throw me off-kilter if they were not the perfect cover for my true occupation.
I change into nondescript clothes with combat enhancements, pack my rail pistol in a small rucksack and leave by the staff entrance. I shall be back before she suspects anything.
I pay for the rental flyer in cash. As the sun rises sluggishly against a melancholy landscape, I glide towards the Upland Villas, my assignment, and, hopefully, Her.
/3
It took me the best part of the morning to locate my mark and the siesta hours to set everything up. The affluent slave trader was in a VIP hunting party that had massacred a pride of the indigenous predators in a gardened-off forest who had been appropriately stunned in advance.
After that, he retired to the well-guarded Lodge of the Chase above the summer-house town of this world’s elite, smack in the middle of the refreshing Uplands, a couple hundred kilometres from the Acropolis by the sweltering sea.
I had located the pair of up-market prostitutes that were to join my hot-shot target after lunch in his bedroom and implanted in their minds instructions on how to disable the building’s security envelope with the mil-grade device I gave them. I sealed their silence with the routine sleep-through-and-forget conditioning.
With dusk heartbeats away, I park my air car beside a huge evergreen at the edge of Her estate, at the end of a row of the finest villas.
It was a mere ten-minute flight from my Upland hostel, where I had lain low for hours after the mountain gendarmerie went into panic mode following the beheading of a prominent business figure in his sleeping quarters.
Traffic was quickly re-allowed as the rich have little patience with inconvenience, even if invoked by the demise of a peer.
We had this ritual as children back home, walking barefoot whenever we were together, in spring or autumn.
I slip off my shoes and amble across the darkening lawn’s suppleness towards the open panoramic wall of her manor, the daytime resplendence of her prized flowering bushes only a pallid hint in the evening breeze.
But in my mind, I can see all their hues supremely, equally as her smiling face inside the one-storey, extravagant building.
Entering her living room, I encounter a hologram sculpture of a bull-leaper in a Minoan loin-cloth hanging onto the woolly hair on the jumping bull’s chest for dear life with one hand while in the other brandishing a short spear.
“His tenacity reminds me of yours,” she says, hidden behind an ornamental pillar at the side of the chamber.
“And the way his right arm is bent, his time to zero is reminiscent of mine,” I reply. “In seven hours, I have to be back in that armpit of a port city to innocently await the return of my crazy bitch of a wife from a night of excess.”
Her leg beckons from the shadow, and I step through the image of the triumphant youth — and for an instant, I believe the two of us may also escape the fate our bull masters have assigned us.
The story above was first published on X (Twitter) and is © 2024 by David Pahor. No part of my stories should be used to train AI technology to generate text, imitating my writing style.
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