This one is a short story

   This one is a short story. Because stories don’t have to be long to matter. I bet you can find many examples of this, maybe all around you or in the lives of people you know. Maybe you are one of those short stories. Don’t be scared. It’s nothing bad, not always at least. One would think of death right away but that’s not what it’s all about. Sometimes a short story is only short because there’s not a lot of tragedy and drama to tell. Maybe it’s just a nice little story, one to read children when they feel hopeless.

 Being a short story is probably difficult but getting used to it can be fun and interesting. After all, you don’t have the large amount of layers that other stories have. And again, don’t be sad. Having layers does not mean you are less deep or profound in any way. It just means that people can really get to know you easily, and don’t have to be constantly digging for something to find. Simplicity here is key and, again, it is not something good or bad. It depends on what your story tells to others.

 Maybe your story is a short one because everything happens in a fraction of time, a tiny piece of a huge ocean of things that happen. That makes it special, it makes it one of a kind and it certainly makes it interesting for people that know how to appreciate things that have particular characteristics. Yes, I know we all want to have twists and turns and many surprises in every single corner. But not every story has to have them, just as not every person in the world has to have the same kind of life.

 Sadly, we have done with the short story the same thing that we have been doing with people. We only value them if they are appealing from a distance, as if we were choosing fruit in the supermarket. But stories are more elaborated; it doesn’t matter if they are short or long. We all have a value, we all have something someone can see and find appealing. Some people say there cannot be books about tastes and what that means is that you cannot put everyone in the same group just because you want to.

 No, short stories are filled to the top with magical things that we can see in plain sight, maybe they are even common but done in a new way, so we appreciate them as if they were new. A short format, in any kind of way, makes it all much more fun: it makes us explore and learn from things we already thought we know. It makes us feel as if something tiny and personal can also be ours. Its obvious big things can be for everyone. Their size helps. But it’s not always that smaller things can become something for everyone, making us feel a little bit more special than we already are.

 I know what you’re thinking: I said this story was a short one. And it is. Because I’m about to sum it all up and tell you what it is about short stories that I find so appealing, so great. And it’s very simple: they enable me to create entire worlds in one second and it gives me the possibility to give those worlds to other people, that could read my story once and again, but they could even continue from my words into theirs, creating the perfect work of art: one that reunites more than one person, more than one world.

 Of course, anyone knows that writers are creators of the universe. We make sense of everything that is around us and we use all of that to create new things. Maybe some of those things are not really that new or interesting, but our goal is to make anything turn on its head and become something else. That’s the magic of writing, of creating in any type of art. That’s why we do it: because we are able to bring into the world new and exciting things that first appear in our brains and that we then translate into words.

 Short stories are all around us, in poetry and painting, also in dance and cinema. So many art forms use the concept of a short story to tell whatever it is that they want to transmit to their audience. And they use it because it works, because when people hear or read or see one a short story, they can instantly imagine it all. They don’t have to be awfully educated, or live in a certain way or in a certain place. All that is required is for them to be part of the human experience and they will understand it all, in a heartbeat.

 So that is all. This is today’s short story, about short stories. Always remember that there is more than only one way to do something, anything. Don’t ever let anyone tell you different. And, like me, just keep going. Not for them, but for you. Because you won’t forgive yourself if you don’t.

Through the Alps

   The train’s movement woke me up as it pierced through the longest tunnel in the route. The trip from Italy to Germany can be quite annoying because of that, although you get to check out some beautiful sights in between the tunnels, so it’s not that bad. The very dim lights of the tunnel gave me an eerie glimpse of the people that were in the same cabin, all of them fast asleep, not disturbed by the movement as I was. It was right then when I heard someone rushing by the aisle, stumbling and then running off.

 I was about to yell and pull the door of the cabin making a lot of noise, but I remembered my friends were sleeping so I stood up and carefully pulled the door open. Once I was standing on the hallway, I close the door again and enjoyed the show the little lights on the floor of the train were doing. They turned on and off and on and off. It made the hallway look like some kind of disco. I looked down the hall but there was no one there, at least not where I could see. I decided to walk in the same direction as the person I had seen.

 I had to move from one car to the other. Apparently most people were asleep because there was not one noise breaking the silence, only the one of the train travelling on steel. The tunnel, I recalled, was so long it could take up to half an hour to traverse it completely. And if I was not mistaken, we had entered it less than ten minutes ago. So walked on knowing that natural light would take its time to comeback. The third car I entered was completely dark; the lights on the floor were not working.

 Then, I saw him. The lights on the tunnel were too weak to actually see anything but his form was noticeable. I stood there, on the entrance to the car and waited for the shadow to make its move. But it didn’t. It just stood there, most likely watching me, until it dropped something on the floor and my curiosity pushed me forward, in order to check the object closer. I walked half way and then the shadow bent its knees and fell to the floor, apparently unconscious. Something was wrong.

 Not only wrong but very wrong. The object on the floor shimmered with the dim yellow lights of the tunnel. It was obviously a knife, the kind you use to cut a steak. I remembered watching those on the restaurant car, a place I had only sat once earlier that day. It was a bit too expensive for me but I did remember watching someone eating a piece of juicy red meat with a knife just like that one. However, the handle on the one on the floor was glistening with dark red blood. Some of the silver edge had stains of it too. It was so strange to see that there, doing nothing but dripping blood.

 The train moved violently and it was then I realized what was going on and how serious it could be. I wanted to tell someone about it but I also realized I hadn’t seen one single person from the train company around the hallways. Neither a security person nor a waiter. There was no one around to denounce such a strange thing happening. Because bloody knives are only found on the floor of trains in novels or movies, but never in real life. What to do in that case, when there’s no one to turn to?

 The shadow then groaned. I got scared, walking back a little, abstaining myself from touching the bloody knife. I was about to turn around and look for someone to help, when the shadow said something. I had no idea what it said, because it wasn’t really articulating words. At least not words I understood. I got closer and the shadow coughed and suddenly looked up. I could not tell if it was a man or a woman, even if it was young or old. But I knew it was someone disturbed, as its eyes were red and mad.

 Then, the shadow spoke once again. I finally understood what language it was speaking but I had no idea what the words meant. I had seen several movies in German and I had even studied a bit of German back in college, but not enough to understand what the shadow was saying. Maybe it was asking for help or maybe it was begging for me to go away. I had no idea, as my trip through Europe had not contemplated helping dying or crazy people in dark trains while traversing a long tunnel.

 However, my instinct told me to help that person. So I got closer and tried to make something out of the words it was saying. By getting closer, I finally realized I was interacting with a young man, maybe half my age. He had delicate features covered by a large amount of very blonde hair. He was obviously of Germanic descent as the eyes that were looking at me were made of a very deep blue, almost the color that ice gets sometimes. Those eyes gave me a shiver.

 I spoke to him in English, asking if he needed any help. He wouldn’t answer, so I decided to speak a little slower. That seemed to do the trick because the young man started nodding violently, his eyes becoming even redder and more insane. It was quite disturbing to watch but not as disturbing as when he stood up and revealed his tainted clothes to me. He was wearing what any boy would ear in the summer: shorts and a stripes shirt. However, both were soaked in the same dark blood that covered the knife. I tied one and two together and realized I had a killer in front of me.

 I started breathing heavily but had to control it because the kid was getting worked up to. I relaxed so he did too. However, he did seem to be breathing a lot heavier than he should. He was obviously scared. Maybe he had killed his mother or father, or maybe a brother or sister. He had done it with a knife he had found close by and he had taken advantage of the tunnel to run away. But they were in a train and there are not that many places were you could hide. Ask Agatha Christie.

 For a moment, I was lost. I had no idea what to do. Yeah, maybe looking for a security agent and giving them the kid would be the smartest thing to do but it also seemed like a very wrong thing to do. The kid was obviously traumatized and maybe he had done what he had done out of self-defense. Maybe he had been bullied by someone or harassed by his family or at least one member of it. There were so many things to consider and reflect on before just running out of that car. It wasn’t simple.

 Then, as if in a dream or a religious movie, natural light filled the space. They had finally come out of that dreadful tunnel and the train was now advancing through the mountains by a large beautiful lake. The view out there was amazing but inside the train things were not exactly that. I realized then, with light, that the young man had not injured anyone else. Someone had injured him. He had blood pouring out of his body from a point around his stomach. It was something of a miracle to see him standing there.

 I finally did what took me so long to do: I ran out of the car and made noise, lots of noise. Finally a security guard appeared and I took him directly to the place where the knife and the boy were. When we got there, the young man had collapsed on the floor, falling on his face next to the knife. Some people on the neighboring cabins had stepped out and were screaming like lunatics. I ran to the boy and tried to wake him up but there was no point. He had bled out to death. I had acted too slowly.

 When we finally got to a train station, the body was brought out and sent the local morgue. Every single passenger was questioned by the police, especially me. I told them every single thing that had happened and they let me go without saying anything. I saw the parents on my way out of that place.

 The train departed later the following day. As curious as I was, I went one more time to the police station to ask about what had happened. Apparently, the autopsy had revealed the wound had been self-inflicted. The young man had committed suicide. I would think of him for the rest of my life.

Took me long enough

   It hadn’t really been a nightmare. I mean, my body hurt and the things I saw didn’t made me jump of happiness but it actually wasn’t a good dream either. It was just a very strange dream in which I had seen people that hadn’t been close to me for a long time. In the dream, we even slept in the same bed, we spent a long time together, sharing moments that only really good friends would share. I don’t remember, but it felt as if I had been dreaming about work but we did not work once during the dream, we just moved around, not worried about anything in the world. It felt so strange.

 It was even stranger when I woke up and tried to make sense of it. My body was actually tied, as I had really been running around my room the whole evening. Those kind of dreams also made my head hurt because the involved an especially big investment of memory and all the imagination I could use. Besides that, my body tended to get very tense when I dreamt about something so tense. Once, my teeth had been grinding so hard against one another that one of them lost a tiny part that I probably swallowed or something.

 I have no idea why it is that I dreamt such a weird scenario, but I did. We were all in a bed, the biggest bed ever I believe. And then this guy that wanted to have sex with me kept insisting all night, even after I had given him a reason to stop insisting with it. I had helped him, if that is the correct expression, but he wanted more and more, touching me and trying to get closer and closer and I pushed back as strongly as I could because, after all, I didn’t wanted to wake everybody up just because that guy was been such a dick.

 But then he tried to do it without permission, almost forcing me to have him. So I pushed and directed what he was using to annoy me towards the guy that was sleeping on the other side. I have no idea what exactly happened, but the other guy almost jumped out of bed and they had some sort of argument that I couldn’t clearly hear. Surprisingly, some moments later, no sound could be heard in that room, except for my breathing and the tossing and turning of the guy that he had directed the annoying guy towards. He realized he was a friend from college.

 Maybe friend was a bit of a stretch because they had never really been friends in the traditional sense. We did study together but that’s as much we had in common. He was from another country and he tended to be always in a mood that would be more appropriate to a rich intellectual. He was always musing about poems and writers. That was in the real world though. In the artificial world, he seemed to love attracting looks to his face. He was annoying in real life; of course he had to be it too in that weird dream.

 However, in my dream, I tried to talk to him the day after what happened and he does talk but he doesn’t say anything about what happened. He really seems like a douchebag but I know the real one is not really like that. I mean, he doesn’t get that far from that description, but I always told him that he was so kind and smart; he could be whomever he wanted with all that knowledge. But that’s who he was, a guy that love to attract attention to himself and that’s fine because at least it’s real, that’s really him and that’s how people should love him.

 The rest of the characters in my weird dream are a little harder to point out. That’s because there were only two that kind of behaved like protagonists and all the rest were just filler, floating around with no real purpose. The other guy was someone I was sure to know but that I couldn’t really place anywhere. I know there is someone like that close by or at least I have met someone exactly like that but I have no idea from what world I drove him out of. All that dreaming and nightmares and so on, made me feel kind of tired.

 I stood up from my bed, and soon realized how early and dark it was. I hadn’t woken up at that time for a while, since I was in high school to be honest. The world outside same to be drenched in a storm made of the color blue. It was just my imagination, I guess. I decided to step into my shower and get cleaned and presentable in order to start the day, even if that day happened to be a Sunday. I had the whole weekend to think about what had happened in my dream. I thought I wanted to let it go, but no, I just couldn’t stop thinking about it.

 Especially about that guy that was basically harassing me. He was really coming forward to me as if we had met before. I was sure we had but I couldn’t remember when and that had really happen or at least I was almost certain it had. The warm water in the shower helped me realize that I did know that guy but only by sight. He was one of my followers on the social network. We hadn’t met or anything but we wrote one another very frequently or at least that was some months ago. I had no idea what had happened to him.

 Maybe he was so very well inscribed in my subconscious that my brain decided to be turned into that villain that we see throughout the movie. Or maybe I actually knew how much I liked him and just wanted him so much that I decided, in my dream, to try and have something with me. Of course, that would make me the one to blame for whatever happened during that whole strange experience. I was fine with that. I just wanted to understand it all.

 I think I wanted that to happen. I mean, not what happened with my college friend in the dream but rather what the other guy was asking from me. After all, it wasn’t everyday that I found someone that wanted me so badly. It had a very bad side to it, of course, but somehow, in a very very sick way, it was a very attractive thing to happen. That’s why in the dream, even there, I was willing to have sex with him once, just to enjoy the feeling of how I would love to have someone that actually wanted me and no one else, even if I was only for sex.

 I got out of the shower and dried myself up pretty slowly. It was a strange dream, just a very weird dream that I should leave behind but I just couldn’t because it was so vivid in my head. I went back to my room and let myself fall into my bed. I was in a towel and kind of wet and even so I didn’t really care about anything else than that feeling that I really was in conflict over something that shouldn’t entail any kind of conflict. It was just a dream and that’s that. I had to learn to let go of things that weren’t’ there to help me but to disturb me.

 I actually fell asleep for an hour or so. When I woke up, I was bit shaken because it was very cold and the towel had fallen to the ground. I was almost freezing so I put some clothes on and decided to go out for a bite, in order to remove his face and presence from my head, from both the good and the bad part of the dream. I couldn’t keep trying to make head or tails of it, so I just wanted to have some peace, at least for a little while. Going out was a good idea.

 I first went to a fast food place and I thought I had seen him there. And then I thought I had seen him in a bookstore and so on. He was everywhere and my mind was obsessed about a person that I didn’t even know who it was. I decided to go back home and just try to relax and distract myself. That worked just fine because I decided to simply not think about it any of it, not what happened or how it had felt. It was all out of me for the time being and I truly hoped to be able to have a normal sleep know that I had gotten over it.

 But then, when I fell asleep again, he came back and he was clearer this time. What I mean was that I could see his face in something very similar to high definition. Thank to that, I realized I had never really met that person. But then I realized something else: as I got closer to him and raised my hand, he grabbed it and caressed his cheek with it, and then he kissed my fingers and looked at me straight in the eye. What happened was that I had fallen in love with someone I didn’t know. How was that possible? Was he real, somewhere or was he just an illusion I had built for myself?

A princess in the woods

   Inside the coach, the princess stood still, trying not to move a lot while being transported from her kingdom to the one she had been promised to. A marriage of convenience had been settled and her parents were thrilled to know that the prince that had requested her as queen was a very wealthy and powerful person. His kingdom had recently won new territories over a weaker enemy and because of that he had many presents waiting for the princess. But first she had to end her five-day journey over mountains and forests. The road that connected both kingdoms was rarely used and no coach was prepared for such a bumpy ride. Neither was the princess or her escorts.

 Inside the coach there was only one more person: her handmaiden. It was the only person there who could interact with both the princess and the men that were in charge of her safety. The young woman was not allowed to show her face for any reason while traveling to meet her future husband as it was deemed bad luck for any other man to see her before the wedding. So when they stopped for her to go and relieve herself, she was accompanied by her handmaiden and would wear a thick veil in front of her face. She looked strange but those were the customs people respected and it was better to respect them because no one ever knows who takes them very seriously and decides to punish those who don’t respect tradition. The kingdom that they were heading to was a very traditional place and known also for its violent ways.

 There were two guards always riding by the sides of the coach, the driver was also trained as a swordsman and the only footman was also very handy with the sword. When stopping at night to eat and rest, they would always form a small circle around a fire and would talk about women, battles and their work for the kingdom. They also discussed food and their own strength. And every single night, the princess would hear their discussion from the coach. She had to pretend she was fast asleep but the truth was she was fascinated by what men talked about. It seemed that, whatever it was that they talked about, it was real and natural and they weren’t tied down because of tradition or anything like that.

 In the mornings, the handmaiden would bring her breakfast. Every meal had to be consumed inside the coach and they could only stop the transport if she couldn’t relieve herself easily inside the coach. Her handmaiden threw piss out of the window but that couldn’t be done with the rest. For the men, it was funny when they had to stop for the other reason, as with all the rules the princess always seemed like a creature of myth but then they realized she was as human as the rest of them and that amused them but they only talked about it at night, when the women were asleep or at least that’s what they thought.

 Midway to the king’s castle, they realized they had to go slower. The road was full of rocks and very narrow in some points, especially as they got closer to the ocean. So the following days went very slow. The princess was bored out of her mind and the men were thinking about the moment they had accepted to be the escort of the princess. Of course, it was an honor, but the regions they were crossing were far from nice and safe. Many merchants said that the route was extremely dangerous for anyone who transported goods around and that’s what they were doing. Transport someone that was now owned by a powerful king. It was awful to put it like that but that’s how thing’s were: wives were not a companion but an asset of the man.

 One morning, what they feared happened. The pointy rocks managed to break one of the wheels and the two women were asked to descend in order to fix the problem. The handmaiden took the princess by the hand and they sat down on a rock, facing the opposite side of where the men were working. They had a spare wheel so they put themselves to work but then they heard something strange. Or better, they didn’t hear anything. There was not a single sound in the whole forest. Only the ocean on the distance could be heard. They decided to accelerate their work and try to leave the place immediately but that wouldn’t be possible. Very slowly, a group of men emerged from the trees and bushes.

They all had paint on their face and most were pointing an arrow to each one of the travellers.  One of the strangers walked up to the women and tried to get them to walk towards the coach. But the handmaiden started speaking fast, explaining whom she was with and what the traditions were for. The stranger kept moving his hand, trying for them to move but it wouldn’t work. Then, he got close to the handmaiden and she just launched herself onto him, fighting and trying for them not to touch the princess. But then the sound of an arrow put an end to it. It had pierced the head of the handmaiden, who was left on the ground before they grabbed the princess and threw her towards the men.

 The strangers surrounded them but lowered their weapons. They only looked at the people that they were preying on and were apparently trying to decide what to do. They spoke in a strange language and pointed to the princess often. Then, one of them got near the woman but the footman cut his walk. He tried to explain who she was but they pushed him aside and grabbed the girl. They pulled off the veil and revealed her face. One of the strangers, apparently the leader, seemed pleased with himself and grabbed the girl, pulling her towards the forest. She tried to resist without screaming but there was nothing to do. The man was string and pulled her to a place no one could see them.

  There, she knew that she was going to die or worse. She tried to prepare herself in order to fight as well as she could but there was no need because the man that had pulled her to that area of the forest just stood up there, looking at her. She did the same but didn’t know whether he was getting ready to do something or if he was just looking at her. Time seemed to have stopped and she was tired of waiting. If she was going to die, she wanted it to happen fast and soon. But the man just looked and her and finally pulled a bottle from a bag in his waist. He put some water on his hands and started washing his face thoroughly. She didn’t understand what he was doing but then she realized the paint was falling from his face and that, when he finished, he looked like a different person. To be honest, he looked like a person she knew well.

 The man just looked at her and then she asked: “Thomas”? Thomas had been one of her best friends when she was little, they had been best friends until she became a princess and a woman and he just disappeared. He walked up to her and told her that it was pleasure to see her again, more beautiful than ever. Her cheeks turned red and he just got closer and hugged her. She felt nervous at first but then she remembered and everything was ok. It was the person she remembered, the first man that she had loved. She held him strong for a few minutes until she decided to ask him what he was doing in that forest.

 Apparently, she had stopped seeing him around because he had been expelled from the kingdom, as well as his family. The princess wanted to be protected and they wanted a better husband for her in the future so they decided to disappear every single man that had any contact with her up to the moment when she became a woman. They were all sent to other kingdoms, towns, left to die of starvation because they used to be rich people that did what they wanted when they wanted and suddenly they had nothing to survives with.

 But Thomas was stronger than that and he had formed a group of rebels that protected the good people from the bad ones. They protected peasants from their kings, who only wanted them to work and die, so to be replaced easily afterwards. They also fought against traditions and once they had heard about the princess been promised to the cruel king to the north, Thomas personally decided to kidnap her and free her from burden. But she didn’t know what to say or what to do. She realized she was going to become a slave or worse but Thomas seemed too violent, not much different than what they said the king was. But then, again, the sound of an arrow ended it all. Thomas body stumbled down and the princess screamed, watching as the king she had been promised to smiled as he held his crossbow.

 Her life had just begun and it was going to be a hard one.