Like a Fairy Tale

December 20, 2011 at 6:06 pm · Filed under Mostly fiction, Stories ·Tagged author, Charles L. Mashburn, http://bluebellbooks.blogspot.com/2011/12/short-story-slam-week-17.html, http://chance-of-sunshine.blogspot.com/2011/10/cinderella-on-her-tea-break.html, https://charleslmashburn.wordpress.com/2011/11/23/the-last-grain-of-sand/, https://charleslmashburn.wordpress.com/2011/12/08/hope/, story

This story is in response to Bluebell Books’ Short Story Slam week 17 prompt, and is a continuation of a story I started in week 15, The Last Grain of Sand. The second part of the continuing saga, Hope, was posted on Bluebell’s Short Story Slam #16.  If you’d like to read the first two parts of the story prior to reading this one, click on the titles below. In any case, I hope you enjoy this one. I call it Like A Fairy Tale.

Part one: The Last Grain of Sand

Part two: Hope

Part Four: Then There Were Three

Part Three:

Like a Fairy Tale

 I slept in a big farmhouse and had my first good meal, having survived on cold canned goods the first three days after coming out of the research bunker. The acrid smell of the air and rain had made me cautious of anything un-sealed. Evidently the emergency generator hadn’t stopped running long before I reached the farmhouse, because the refrigerator was still cold and everything in it was in good shape.

I fired up the gas grill on the porch, cooked a huge porterhouse steak, washed it down with a six-pack of beer, and slept like a log. I awoke just before ten the next morning.

The air outside of the city seemed cleaner, and my hope was there were areas unaffected by whatever had killed every person and everything mechanical in Houston. I had to believe it was true, or there was no reason to go on. My wife and daughter might still be alive and wondering if I’d survived.

The emergency generator had obviously been working not long before I arrived at this house; the refrigerator, too. That had to be a good thing. Nothing in Houston had worked. Whatever had killed the people had somehow affected the cars and anything mechanical. I’d been thinking about it, and thought maybe it had had some kind of effect on petroleum products. I chuckled, thinking it ironic that the lifeblood of a nation could be the very thing it perished by.

Another thing was bugging me; all the farm houses out here east of Houston were empty, but there were no bodies, and it seemed everything was intact. Had folks in the rural areas fled? Had they been taken? I wasn’t sure what was going on, but I had a very uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach.

…..

The farmhouse I’d slept in was miles behind me, but every so often I’d pass another one. It was almost noon, and the backpack I’d taken from the little boy’s room was getting heavy. I’d packed too many cans of food in it, not thinking about the weight.

I stopped beneath a live oak tree, thinking I’d lighten the load, but as I shrugged the backpack off and started to sit down on a large rock beneath the tree, I saw something to the right of the old house sitting about a hundred yards off the road. From where I was, it appeared to be a garden plot, but there was something very odd about it. I left the backpack on the ground by the rock and started toward the garden.

As I got closer, I was amazed to realize what I’d seen was indeed a garden—a pumpkin patch actually—consisting of a half dozen or so of the largest pumpkins I’d ever seen. I was about twenty feet from the pumpkins when a sound caused me to stop in my tracks. It was the sound of a woman’s voice, and it seemed to be coming from the other side of the giant pumpkins.

Moving quietly, I slipped behind a tree and peered around it.

It was like a fairy tale.

The woman—I guessed her to be in her early twenties—was sitting atop one of the giant pumpkins. She held a mug of something hot in her hands—steam was rising from it—and appeared to be talking to a brightly colored bird sitting on a limb just above her. The bird’s head was cocked to one side as he watched her and seemed to be listening to her soft sweet voice. Further down the limb the bird was perched upon, there hung a pair of shoes. Sunlight twinkled on them, and I blinked then rubbed my eyes, thinking I couldn’t be seeing what I thought I was seeing. The shoes appeared to be made of glass.

As I was trying to rub the illusion from my eyes, the woman suddenly stopped talking, and when I took my hands away from my eyes, she was gone.

Copyright © 2011 C. Mashburn

Image Credit: Chance of Sunshine: Cinderella On Her Tea Break

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