Fireflies and Ferns
Flash fiction response to Monthly Theme for October
It was dark on the train save when it clattered beside tiny villages that were settling down for the night. But they were small and far between and the lights only served to accentuate the darkness at other times. The old woman clutched her granddaughter’s hand tightly and looked around her with terrified eyes. There were very few people and the seats around her were mostly empty, except for some young people returning home from work. They seemed to prefer neither company nor light, sprawling in the darkest corners, nearly invisible in the semi-darkness, seemingly lost in their own thoughts.
In one hand the old woman had a small purse and within it, train tickets to a place and a railway station she had neither been to, nor heard of, before that night. Beyond the fact that they would alight from the train there, she knew nothing. She was trying her best not to think. But clearly, she feared pursuit, for at every station the train halted at, she shrank back into the shadows, drawing the little girl closer to her. When the train drew out of the station, she seemed to relax, but clearly, she was not far from panic.
The small girl, all of four years, was tired and sleepy, and she had the beatific, unquestioning face and faith that most children have at that age. Her grandmother held her close, and owing to the hour of the night, the rhythmic rocking of the train and the comfortable proximity of her favourite person in the world, the child slipped in and out of slumber.
Small towns and hamlets, little crofts and big barns, shrouded in darkness raced by. And still they went on.
And now, all signs of human habitation were left behind. The railway track cut through groves of trees and small woods untouched by human hands. The ground began to rise and grow craggier. Tall granite walls towered on both sides of the line and it began to look tunnel-like. At the stations that the train halted briefly at, people alighted in ones and twos until there was no one left on the train besides the old woman and the child. When it was time for the old woman to get out of the train, according to the destination on her ticket, there was no one else to alight. They got off at the platform and there was no one about. The train pulled out of the station.
Beyond the dimly lighted station, there didn’t seem to be any semblance of civilization or any kind of light. The old woman held the child closer to her and pulled her cardigan tighter around her shoulders. Shakily, she drew the child to the single serviceable wooden bench on the station that was all that was provided to travellers at the station and sat down with her. The girl nestled close to her grandmother, the only thing that she knew in that vast unknown space, and waited, without questions and complaints.
The woman looked around her timidly and with foreboding. The silence was near-total, broken only by the sound of crickets and the sudden, alarmed call of a night bird or two. Farther away, not even the wind stirred. The darkness was punctuated by a cloud of fireflies that rose and fell, vanished, and reappeared to some unheard melody. The old woman drew a deep shuddering breath, and the little girl, disturbed, perhaps, by the anxiety and uncertainty in the sound, looked searchingly at her favourite relative. The woman, looking down at the face turned up to her, smiled reassuringly, but with dry lips at the child. Insensibly reassured, the child nestled closer to her grandmother.
Imperceptibly, at first, a slight breeze began to blow. It stilled, then another began, then another, each stronger than the previous one, until a wind began to make itself heard and felt. The wind picked up and it seemed as though the force with which it blew would knock down or tear up the railings of the railway station. Within a matter of minutes, the wind turned into a gale.
The old woman, with no place to shelter herself, lifted the child onto her lap and covered her with the thick shawl she wore around her shoulders and drawing her closer into her body, tried to shield her with her own body from the raging wind. The child, cocooned and comforted, promptly went back to sleep.
Then, the wind stilled completely, as though it had been severed with a knife. On that dark, empty platform a shape loomed, all in black, towering in front of the woman and child. Fireflies outlined the shape of the person, if a person it was. The single carriage lamp that served as the only illumination on that lonely rail platform accentuated rather than inhibited the darkness.
The old woman gazed at the apparition. Above the all-encompassing blackness and the fireflies playing peek-a-boo, gleaned what was obviously a face. The form bent down to the dumbfounded old woman and stretched out a hand with tapering fingers and very long, curved, claw-like nails. “Come,” she intoned, in a voice so singularly sweet that the old woman wordlessly put her hand into the palm stretched out to her. She and the child were gently tugged into a standing position, beside the form which seemed more a woodland nymph, than a woman.
The old woman felt an inexplicable feeling of warmth and well-being fill her battered mind and bruised soul. She breathed in the smell of forest fern and leaf smoke, wildflowers, and small meandering streams unseen by human eye. “Come,” the creature said again. The old woman, the girl child, and the wood sprite walked into the darkness. As they passed by, the pole on which the carriage lamp stood, stepped smartly out of the way, hopping a couple of steps to the other end of the station, then disappeared altogether.
The inspiration for this story is the very intriguing Monthly Theme for October Prompt on Ravyne Hawke ‘s brilliant, light-filled, new publication, Promptly Written.
