Signed, Sealed And Delivered - Flash Fiction

He’d been prompted to watch out for a sign. But where? Whither the co-ordinates? Was he supposed to roam outside or to remain embosomed in his room? The exegesis hadn’t been clear. Currently he was stationed in his room, scrutinising the everyday for deviation from the familiar. Was the sign to be something inherently meaningful, or something that only he could ascribe substance to? Would it be a material object, or something based in language. Be it script or runic? Did that perhaps make it more of a symbol than a sign? 

He had never noticed that stain on the carpet before, but he couldn’t accept that ancient spilled coffee or the gravy that broiled his pre-cooked dinners, suddenly became presentimental. An accidental Rorschach pattern somehow transmuted into a figuration of his future, no he doubted that was the likely source. Carelessly slopped aliment was no waters of the Nile turning into blood and somewhat lacked the wondrousness of a burning bush.

He glanced up to the wall and the framed print suspended there. It had come with the rental, left by a previous tenant, or more likely to have been furnished by the landlord. An abstract piece of nothing, though right now its contours were welling and pulsing with significance. He had never previously paid it much mind. Of course the swirls themselves were not in motion, but he wondered if the picture itself had perhaps moved ever so slightly off its habitual axis. He approached it and gingerly rubbed his index finger along one plane of the frame. He examined the dust that coated the pad, like a police fingerprint record, a glyph in itself, but decided this was the wrong type of indicia. After all fingerprints themselves never changed over the course of one’s life. He was on the wrong track there, a hallmark was a permanent symbol not a momentously exigent one. He lifted the frame from its hook, examined the cork backing but found no message welted in there. He stared at the burnished rectangle patch of wall where the print had covered and preserved the paintwork. If it was a symbol it remained opaque to him. A blank TV screen with the set switched off. 

Maybe that was it, the random permutation of TV programme thrown up at him when he first engaged its ignition. An advert for a product, a TV evangelist, the score of a soccer match or the stock exchange ticker tape scrolling a key coded set of numerals across the bottom of the screen, any one of those could hold the key. Hastily he replaced the picture's string over the hook and bounded over to spark the set into life. But a lame comedy series was what first met his eyes, not even one with a star who had subsequently been prosecuted for crimes enacted on the back of his celebrity. His digits played over the remote control, quickly rifling through the channels’ formulaic liturgical burnt offerings. He slitted his eyes narrower trying to detect any subliminals from the quick change from channel to channel but nothing was delivered up to him for revelation. 

A fluttering wrenched his attention upward to the ceiling. A moth was battering at his Chinese lantern shade in its determination to burrow through the red hot light source within. The lantern barely rippled under its bantamweight thrust, but he did notice the shadow of both projected large on the ceiling. Blown up several times their actual size. And yet he himself cast no shadow in the room. Was that the sign? His own lack of a shadow, yet here was an insect larva feasibly from Satan’s own realm cast large in the artificial glow from hell’s fires? He tilted the paper shade to admit access for the moth to the bulb which it obligingly did so and perished with a pleasing sizzle against the scorching glass. He watched its Icarian descent to the floor whereupon it landed right in the middle of the carpet stain, just at the moment when the TV announced a newsflash and the picture on the wall slithered drunkenly to the diagonal on its axis. A multitude of signs, but which one was the true indicator? 

Human Marks Of Divinity - Fridayflash

He'd been following the short man with a limp for a few months now. Clearly both were creatures of habit, standing at the same place along their respective railway platforms each day. Boarding the commuter train in the same carriage, exiting by the same door. They never once acknowledged each other in that way men don't.

He only noticed the man's tattoo once the belated arrival of Summer entailed that the smaller man donned shorts. Shorts that came well down the truncated leg, but shorts all the same. Following in the other's wake at a distance that allowed for the splay of his gammy leg, he espied something winking at him from the man's calf. Whatever it was quickly resheathed itself beneath the trouser fabric, like a puppet diving back behind the curtain. But each forward motion hoisted the cloth up once again and manifested a tattoo to him.

His first thought was wondering why it adorned the back of the leg, a place where the man himself would seldom be able to view it. Perhaps the tattoo was some sort of plaintive runic inscription to cure his lameness. It certainly did seem to be calligraphic rather than pictorial, though it was an indeterminate script to his eye at this distance. He wanted to move closer to try and pierce the words, but the dragging leg formed its own natural buffer zone. Besides he was struck that were this a woman he was pursuing, any further incursion of personal space would have been both unseemly and threatening.

Perhaps the man's lover traced over the characters with her fingers when they were in bed together. That she 'read' his flesh, which would have entailed him lying flat on his stomach. He shook the unsettling notion clear from his squirming mind and dropped back a pace or two from the man. More of the tattoo seemed to be insinuating itself at him from beneath the fabric. Maybe his counterpart was speeding up, further stretching his twisted leg.

The inked flow appeared to run down the leg rather than across it. He speculated that it may have been Chinese. Some wisdom of Confucius or the I-Ching perhaps? The man himself certainly wasn't Oriental. But then David Beckham was hardly a denizen of ancient Rome as he misspelled his Latin inscriptions upon the vellum of his own skin. The harder he peered, the more the characters seemed to twitch and flex.

What he really needed to do was to wrestle the man to the ground and satisfy his own burning curiosity. But grappling with a dwarf? That was just too unseemly.

*

She sported the sandalwood paste Tilaka as a mark of her credo. Those in the know would recognise at a stroke her religious affiliations. Those not in the know demonstrated their ignorance by playfully pressing it and demanding what pushing the red button on her forehead actually did. Beyond pushing her invisible button that was. One didn't require a third eye to see into the closed hearts of these host citizens.

But recently even those of her own kind had inflamed her. Since they regarded her mark as definitively casting her into a caste and not one graced with favour as they went to war with each other in this land far from home. A displacement of the insecurities of exile as they turned in on one another. The host citizens turned away and let them get on with paying their blood debts.

*

He held the power of light in his hand. Concentrated, portable, the pent up energy of the universe cradled in his palm. Lean, streamlined and sucking the heat from his skin. He screwed the laser sight on to his sniper's rifle, brought it up to his eye and squinted the other shut. He started playing it over those in the market square some thousand yards away. As invisible as a god.

The red dab pinpointed various parts of people's anatomy as he ranged over them. The stigmata marking the power of life and death he wielded. God might fabricate tissue and muscles and organs, but with his high-powered projectile spitting fire, he could reverse that process and expose the hollowness of the Lord's creation in a bloody spume.

He trained the red laser on the back of a man's calf while he stood at a market stall inspecting its wares. No doubt haggling and chiselling with the vendor in their tired, time-honoured way. Solely serving to reinforce an etiquette of acquiescence and submissiveness. He could cut him down to true size, simply by delivering a shot right now. See him crumple to the ground, clutching his shattered leg. Make him- any of them- dance like the marionettes looped on string that they were. The man's life hung by a thread, he could bend him utterly to his will. The red Mark of Cain would see to that.

He veered his rifle away and bounced his laser into a woman's eyes. Reflexively she jerked her head away and put her hand to her forehead to shield her eyes. Another dumb puppet marching to his tune. She didn't even look around her for the source of her discomfort. Evidently such turning away of her face happened frequently enough for her not to challenge it. She clearly was not worthy of his divine imprimatur.

This wasn't some mote they can just bat away with a hand. For he was Lord of Flies. The movies always showed the devil with burning red eyes. They got that right at least. Although his oracular oracle was Cyclopean.

He matched his red spot to the cosmetic red dot on the forehead of a young woman. Straight between the eyes. Aligning it perfectly, the symmetry appealed to him. Were he to press the trigger now, the two red circles would be expunged by a hole of similar diameter, tingeing black around its perimeter. Until a fresh dribble of red emerged from the hollow. Third eye my eye he thought to himself as he swung the rifle across the vista. The red circle settled across the temple of a child. Was it a child, or just a very small adult? He already appeared to be limping...