Flash Fiction: Year 2!

Last year, I asked you guys to give me some titles so that I could write some flash fiction. It was a whole lot of fun and I'd like to do it again. So, if you could, come up with some more?

The ones I used last year were, "The Darkness That Made the Light," "The Eye," "Sheer Whimsy," "The Weekender," and "The Ritual." So run wild with it. Make them as simple or complex as you like. I'm very excited to do this again. Thanks! Read more!

Old Writing: Jack - Part 4 - Final

            This will be my final letter, though I know now that you will never read it.  I have tried to change the world and failed.  My work, my crimes, have drawn the eye of the public, even that of the crown, to the travesty that is the poverty running rampant like a sickness in the veins of London.  That I should have done so much is beyond anything I or any of my accomplices could have imagined.  But it must stop now.

            I awoke recently to the newsboys outside my home proclaiming another murder in my name.  In my bleariness, I nearly fell back to sleep before the abrupt realization that it was not by my hand that this most recent of crimes was perpetrated.  I threw myself from the bed and dressed quickly, racing to catch the boy before he moved on.  A few pence later and I sat with the paper in my lap and a terrible chill in my heart.

            That same day, I wrote a letter to the newspaper which had run those previous, denouncing this most recent murder, expressing my outrage at both the killer and the news organization that failed to realize the gross inconsistencies in the separate crimes.  I waited a day, then another.  Nothing.  The letter never saw print, just as these will not, I am now certain.  They will be too rational, not sensational enough.  I will not be the monster you need me to be.  It disgusts me.

            That someone, a twisted, deviant mind, would latch on to my, our, legacy in order to commit such a heinous act is a perverse mockery of those who have died willingly at my hands in order to usher in a new era.  More so, that the sadistic lust of the populace which has turned the media into the sensationalistic, bloodthirsty charade that it has become leaves me without hope for any of you.  I suppose, though, that I should not be surprised.  It is nothing if not indicative of the opportunistic depravity of our time.

            So it ends now.  I cannot bear to carry on this work, knowing that it has, however indirectly, led to this.  There was no justification, no deeper purpose, to the slaughter of this young girl.  I am damned.  I knew the moment Polly’s argument began to sound rational on that night so long ago.  I accept that.

            But I am not the only one.  Each of you who revel in the darkness, who feel a visceral thrill in the depths of your heart or gut at the pain of others, physical or emotional, each willing to watch the world burn around you and do nothing, will be there with me.  Indifference is the greatest of sins and you are all damned.

- Jack

1888

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Old Writing: Jack - Part 3

            When Mrs. Nichols, Polly, approached me, I am ashamed to say that I at first thought the same as any of you would think and nearly shooed her away.  She was an older woman, almost matronly, who had undoubtedly been pretty before poverty and the life it had forced upon her had stripped it away, piece by piece.  She was also, I would come to learn, a very clever woman who, despite her lack of what we in the more refined classes would call true education, had learned enough quickly enough to survive.

            When she asked to speak with me, her voice strong and resigned but with no hint of solicitation, I agreed warily.  So we walked down the streets of London, she talking and I listening, and my eyes were slowly, tactfully, opened to the world as it truly is.  We have, as a ruling class, embraced complex illusions of propriety in order to, we claim, keep the world running as it is meant to run.  Deep down, however, the real reason for our reliance on this rigid social construction is simply to keep ourselves insulated from the cruel havoc we inflict upon others without a second’s contemplation, all in favor of our own comfort.

            Polly explained carefully the injustice that existed just outside our periphery, only acknowledged when we sought out our baser fancies, and only for the brief time it took to partake in them.  It was what she had done more of her life than I should rightly be so, out of necessity, and it was what, she said as we arrived at my home, was going to be the death of her in a very immediate sense.

            By the time we’d reached my doorstep, any hesitation about inviting her in had long since passed.  We had tea and talked long into the night, sometimes about her crusade, the crux of which she had yet to spring upon me, and other about her life, her family, her world.  I was ashamed of the life into which I had been born, something she insisted was foolish with a wave of her worn hand.  She reminded me of my own mother, God rest her soul.

            By the time it all came out, her plan to change the world, the fire was burning low and the first chill of the early morning was just reaching out from the shadows.  She was, she told me, going to die the following Friday.  I began to protest, insisting, as we are wont, that she not lose hope, that disease was unpredictable and medical science expanding rapidly its understanding of the body.  As I rambled on, she watched me serenely, waiting until I had finished to shake her head softly.

            “No,” she said, “You don’t understand.  I’ll die Friday cause you’re going to kill me.”

            She leaned back in the softness of the high-backed chair, into the darkness, as she laid out her plot in intricate detail.  Her words curled inside me like some malevolent serpent, twisting in my gut, in part because of the nature of the crime and in part because, as she continued, I realized with a horrifying certainty the wisdom of her words and that she was right; I was to become a murderer.

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Old Writing: Jack - Part 2

The letters were not my idea, but rather that of one of my co-conspirators.  They were an inspired detail, to be sure.  Without them, those who run the newspapers would quickly lose interest in the murders, regardless of how gruesome or enigmatic.  With them, I perpetuate the scandal which seems the only real purpose of modern newsprint.  With them, I become something more than I am, and idea, a shadow of possibility that lingers in the mind long after the paper has been put aside, and that is the purpose of the letters.  If I am forgotten, then my work, our work, their sacrifice, will be for naught.

            I admit to taking a perverse pleasure in crafting the maniacal ranting of a madman.  It appeals to something dark and sinister inside me, something which, I have come to realize, reflects the world in which we dwell all too closely.  We create a stained veneer of civility, of culture, with customs and traditions that have become almost hallowed.  We do so out of fear.  We are afraid that, if we don’t hold tightly to what we believe, erroneous as it may be, the façade may slip and we may be faced with what lies beneath, squirming and writhing and rotted.  Above all, that is what, more than shifting shadow or my name spoken in hushed tones among friends safely indoors, drives the unsettling terror in our souls.

            You may ask yourself if I question all of this, if I wonder at the lengths to which we’ve gone in the name of salvation.  I do.  The burden of it weighs heavily upon my shoulders, more so each time I watch the life flee from the eyes of someone who, willingly or not, I have sent to what I hope is a better world.  It must be a better world. 

            They give their lives, true, but I have given my soul.  I have a keen empathy for the figure of Death, who must pass into lives so briefly, only to know that, within hours, sometimes less, that life will cease to be more than a collection of memories or whispers in the night.  When they sleep, their suffering ends.  I have not that luxury.  I must wait.  I must hope.  This much change.  It must be a better world.

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