Haven

Flash Fiction

The past called out to her. Not her own, the world’s. 

The people who inhabited the towns before they were cities, the street corners without cameras, the living rooms without machines.

Technology at first had nibbled at her toes, then began to bite down hard, then invaded her privacy in ways she would not be comfortable with me telling you about.

She didn’t say her name out loud much, but when she did, it was Ang with a hard g, like Anger, and in her head, there was a nom de plume that matched. 

Ang had an apartment and a job.

People shouted in the apartment building, and cooked food that smelled like a slaughterhouse, and the job-in a field she once admired- became like treading water in gelatin that smelled like piss.

Ang wore vintage dresses and collected antique timepieces.

For her own sanity, she sketched herself in a place before vehicles and electricity. 

She read books of life before the world was a cacophony of pixels and, though the past world held horrors too, they seemed to be problems fixable by the humans who created them.

Ang carried her timepieces almost like a compass, searching for a place she felt like she belonged.

The few to whom she spoke about her desire to go back in time didn’t quite understand, so she spoke about it less and less and actively sought it out more and more.

How does one do that?

I’m not sure that Ang was sure.

She wandered in a world where engines revved and billboards lit wildly and crosswalks spoke out loud.

Ang could not live in the woods, though the unspoiled nature of them temporarily comforted her.

She wanted to live in an occupied place, a place where souls convened without keyboards.

Miles into a stroll, in a vintage dress whose lace tickled the sidewalk, carrying a pocket watch from the time of horses, she found an abandoned church.

Ang was not a believer in Gods (though she was a person who could describe monsters down to the most minute detail), but she felt the people who once inhabited the pews singing out in unison.

When she told me the dilapidated cathedral felt like home her words seemed metaphorical.

She moved in without permission or hesitation, adopting the sacristy behind the No Trespassing signs as her own, tidying up the naves and anterooms.

The police would come and shoo her out, I was certain, or a young gangbanger with a spray can would scare her away.

When I expressed those concerns she looked at me as though I was shouting marching orders in a foreign tongue on a battlefield that did not belong to me.

Ang patched a hole in the ceiling where squirrels and pigeons had entered and made no attempt to force the animals out.

She bought new votive candles and placed them on the marble altar, lighting them for those who once worshipped here.

A strange name above the bell on the wall of her apartment building let me know that the transition to living in the church had become complete.

A phone call to her place of employment informed me that she was no longer employed.

A new lock on the door of the sacristy shocked but comforted me somewhat.

Ang made me stash my phone in the bushes outside before she allowed me to enter.

She had arrayed her timepieces on a table in a wash of light from stained glass. The pieces were decorative, their innards rusted or gone.

Ang told me that the heat of the light would one day make the hands turn backward.

A pigeon cooed, as though the bird agreed.

Ang stepped into the orange warmth of the beam through the glass and smiled, something she had not done in a very long time. 

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