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100 Years

Story by Deanne De Freitas Patricio

The elder man, now fully bearded, looked uncomfortable in his two-piece suit as he knocked on the young mans' door. He carried great disappointment on his face. It’s been over two weeks and he hasn’t heard from his little brother. The door selflessly creaked open; he popped his head inside and looked around. The boxes haven’t been unpacked and they were starting to collect dust. A letter rested on one top of the boxes. He called out for his little brother a couple more time as he glanced around in the abandon apartment. A shiver random his spine, the temperature in the room was inhumanly cold. He grabbed the letter and it read:

“ Dear brother,

Forgive me, as this may be hard for you to understand. All my life I have been your younger brother, and a part of me still is, but I am also someone else. That someone else is Batbayar – I am Mongolian warrior, who fought and died on the front line, defending our great empire. This is strange, I’m aware – I carried this soul inside me, a cursed and angry soul that woke up when it heard its name. I emerge, my true self emerged and I awake! And I remember everything, down to the last promise I made to her before I left – my wife and my kids. My wife suffered when I left and died shortly from grief. The deep sorrow made her spirit restless. She carried a trouble soul that refused to leave her body. Because of this the God’s granted her a hex to put on both our souls, allowing her to roam the living world as she waits to see me and get the peace she needs - I need to explain to you my brother, the great pain in us. You know many noble souls are granted a cycle of reincarnation as God gives them chances to correct their past mistakes and reap the reward of their sacrifices. It took my soul 100 years to find a body, for 100 years she waited for me on the same land as before. And for 100 years I’ve waited complete my debt to her and see my love. And now that we have meet her hex on our souls have been completed but a spell was placed on my soul long before that childish hex of hers, that woman.

Brother I have a chance to be with her and I have taken it. But I did not leave you without a gift; your son will survive, ignore what those men in white gowns say that is my gift to you, life – death must occur for life to exist. – My nephew will grow up and be built like a warrior ( man of steel). You and your wife will run a happy home well within your old age. That is a promise – no, a gift that I give you and your family. Don’t forget brother these gifts are from us all: your brother Hayao, uncle Batbayar and auntie Enkhuya. Be assured brother we will meet again. “

A tear drops on the letter.

The End

Hopefully, this story was enjoyable and fun read! Look out for more short-stories in the future.

#shortystories #short story #souls #soulmates #writer #writing #love #stories #story #fiction

100 Years

IIII

Her skin gleamed, softening her look. “I am weak – you are strong. Not perfection but balance,” she said.

The unease feeling inside him turned into hatred. He stood up from the floor as fast as his liquor up body would allow him to while never taking his eyes off of her as he carries out the task.

“I’ve never met you!” he said. His word covered in rage, he had demonstrated no attempt in hiding his sudden but potent anger towards her. He was a drunken young man filled with anger trying to maintain his balance. He couldn’t communicated with words merely the wave of anger gravitated off of him. She turned her face away from him and looked down at her hand. The room was deeply in-depth with heavy emotions, allowing no room for any movements or words. But through the thickness between them she said: “Batbayar…please.” ‘Batbayar,’ that word, that sound, those syllabuses. They unlocked something, something deep within him. The key has found its door. His ears popped at the word and began to ring. He grabbed his ear and squeezed down on them as hard as his hand could, he wanted to shut out the ringing but the ringing was coming from inside. He could barely think straight, 'my ear – what is going on? This old witch –stop ring, stop ring, STOP! STOP! The pain locked up his jaw, this made him angrier and underneath his shirt his chest tighten. His whole body now ached, he felt as if he was a small toy figure being crushed between the hands of a large angry – very angry kid. ‘Stop – Stop!’

The landlady reached out and touched his hand, he hadn’t moved at all in the past minute. “Batbayar,” she said again, this time the word mauled at an unhealed wound in his heart’s heart and the ringing tore his eardrums; blood crept out onto his earlobes. At this rate he was sure he was going to die but he couldn’t figure out from what or why. He stood there deaf and paralysis by the immense pain that consumed him. With the last bar of strength and sanity he had left he mustered out, “w..what’s happening?”Her lips parted and twisted forming the answer to his question.

#Part4 #story #shortystories #short story #writing #writer

100 Years

III

That evening the young man stood at the landlady’s door. It was pass visiting hours and he was beginning to wonder if he should be knocking at her door this late. Nobody answered. He hesitated for a bit before knocking again. A minute later the door open and there she was.

The landlady greeted him, “patience is alien concept to a young man, isn’t it? ” and gestured him to come in.

“I’m sorry, I just didn’t want you think I wasn’t coming.”

“Nonsense.” she replied. “Your quite fast, I expected you to come by later.”

Base of off her tone, the young man couldn’t tell if she was teasing him. He decided to assume that she wasn’t. “I tried my best,” he said. She smiled in response.

“What a nice place you have, ” he said walking into the apartment, as he entered the living room it inhaled, physically. An unseen entity filled the room, forcing the walls to act as lungs and expand. His eyes could see the walls around him distort and then solidify back. The young man rubbed his eyes; the day’s labor must have taken a harder toll on him than he taught. The place was hardly lit; the lights highlighted the bare essential needed to navigate the room, the rest of it lay hidden away making his earlier statement a lie. There was no way to tell if the place was nice or not. In the far corner, a dinning table posed under a ceiling lamp decked with food. The light illumined the dishes with such a seductive mannerism. Meat noodle stew, grilled meats, cheeses and assorted sweets never looked so idyllic. A metal decanter, adorned with twinkling silver tapestry join the beautiful portrait, his eye were astonished at fairy tale like spread displayed in veiled room.

“Please sit down, “ she said, guiding him to the table. The dishes gave out a heavenly scent that matched their beauty. Their scent leisurely rose up from the dishes and blended with the air above. The young man took a deep breath and allowed the aroma to travel down to his core. A strong sense of déjà vu coupled along with the delicious scent that now travelled inside him. He took a seat at the table and she joined him, and soon words began to wrestle their way out between the succulent meats and rich liquor that occupied their mouths. Within a few minutes, emptied dishes spread across the table and they were left with nothing to do but talk and drink. Late night drinking between a man and a woman leads to one thing and to that one thing it led to. Or so it felt it would lead to.

There the two were, lying on floor under the dinner table, embracing each other.

”I guess you’ve had a few too many, “ she teased him.

“No,” he slurred, “just you – just… you.”

There drunken laughter trailed off into the apartment.

She placed her head on his chest searching for his heartbeat. There it was. She then ran her fingers down his arm to feel him. ”So similar to before.”

“Wha – what is?” he asked.

“You.”

Humorously looking around he said, “me, I hate to be rude but YOU are too drun–“ The landlady cut him off: “you and I were once one at least that what you made me believe,“ she wasn’t here to listen but to be heard. The young man was silent and she continued, “that night when we met, you build a fire to shield away the dark. The stars ruled the night sky that night, remember?” She paused for a moment and repositioned herself pushing her body against his. Almost as if she was annoyed the two had separate bodies. “In those day’s light only came from stars and fires. After that night we became inseparable, that’s what you made me feel. Three winters later you left me. You left me with a beautiful daughter and your son inside me. You walked out and you said you loved me and you never came back.” The words from her lips dim the room, the darkness around them became pungently apparent. The atmosphere was being strangled. An unease wave crashed inside the young man’s stomach but he kept still.

Unaware or better said uncared by the young man’s motionless response to her word, she kept going, “some people don’t believe that a person can die of sorrow, but the weak dies easily. “

She sat up and looked right at him.

#short story #shortstory #love #death #dark souls #soul #story #writer #writing #words #part3 #three

100 Years

Today similar to yesterday, the Mongolian woman sat outside of her flat door at the bottom floor, she too lived in building. There she sat hiding under the upstairs balcony, smoking her pipe. The sun rays fried the ground in front of her simulating phase one of a desert mirage. Through the rising haze, she sees a car driving toward her. The black car parked itself in front of the building and two men got out, neither men noticed her. She watched them never losing her rhythm: drag, hold and release. The smoke slithered out from her lips. The two gentlemen were now performing or trying to perform the tedious task of carrying their boxes and bags up those discriminating stairs.

A heavily pregnant young woman got out the car and leaned against it. The young lady fanned herself furiously, but the wind had clocked out — not a single strand of her hair moved no matter how much worked she put in; this heat kills. Watching the pregnant lady, the landlady decided to offer the hot girl a stool to sit on while she roasted in the sun waiting for the men to finish. The landlady headed towards the group as she got closer to the group she began to define the feature of the two men and the young girl. The two men were dressed in western outfits, a rare site to see in these parts of China regardless of it being 1929. But with the rise of industrial China and office building being built on every patch of soil, soon the outfits will lose its strange appeal. And all of China will dress in shirts and pants just like this man here. A tall man with scraps of hair around his chin, a sad — no, a failed attempt at a beard. The scraps of hair must have been there forever without blossoming. He was the elder one of the two. As for the other man, he was fresh; he carried the anger and delusion of 20 year old males. Unlike his partner, no hair sprinkled across his chin just sweat. Indeed, a young male can sweat like no other being; his green shirt was stained in it. Even his dark brown hair was sleeked back by it. It traced out his slender frame through his shirt and amplified his pale complexion. Concluding that our fellow was an indoor man. A correct conclusion for he was, the young fellow was starting a new office job in the area and his new pay check gave him the freedom to rent a place of his own. Not for a decent apartment or anything that resembled western luxury. Oh, not for that much freedom.

The landlady bowed as she greeted the group and politely introduced herself. She offered the young lady the stool. She shied away from her offer, at first but hormones will bring the proudest women down to their knees. And by the looks of it hormones commanded her body and they gave her no choice but to accept the oddly crafted stool. And hope it held her weight. The landlady politely asked who the new tenant was. The older man gestured to the young man. Her eyes met the young man’s eyes and they narrowed. The sight of this boy had trigger something. Something within in the magnetic field — a small glitch occurred in the repetitive monotone waves of energy. For a split second there was chaos. The earth underneath the apartment caved in and the ghost house plunged into blackness, together with its tenant. Falling and falling into an endless pit of visionless darkness and spat back out. The house stood there never validating what had occurred. But the environment knew and so did the Mongolian lady. She could hear whispers, the whispers rattled in her ear, an insidious hex she was hearing, and the hex came from the red beads around her neck. The necklaces rattled on every vowel it whispered. The rattling sound was only heard by trained ears and the vibration seen only with sacred eyes.

The young man gave out a courtesy smile. He was taken by the landlady but did not want her to see him as a hooligan or worse another young brat.

The necklace continued to rattle but at a slower frequency, the landlady listens intently to them, keeping on her mask. A small smile and well rested eyebrows. After the beads finished she focused her attention back to group.

She wished them luck with their tedious task of climbing up those stairs. The men let out a light chuckle in respond to her remark and she exits on the joke. But before heading back to her earlier post, she invited the young man over for dinner. Explaining to the young fellow that this was a common Mongolian practice and her way of welcoming new tenants to complex. The young man failing to control his eagerness, accepted.

#writer #story #free #china #short story #red #design #art #mongolia #fictional #fiction #fantasy #fanfic #shortstory #tell stories

One Hundred Years

A frustrated looking bird stood next to her nest singing a cheerful song that would never be heard. Thanks to the loud market behind her that suffocated her self compose jingle. The bird and her nest lived on top of an apartment complex located directly between the market filled with farmers yelling about their goods, shopper’s voices chattering, salesmen and women voices bargaining, and thieves camouflaging their voices. And to its other side was the Mongolian rural nomad’s land, a land that ran on for what could solely be described as eternity with nothing man-made in it, to claim it or stop it; a never-ending beauty. The apartment stood there, outlining the two contradicting sides in a languor manner with its back to China and its face to the land. The apartment building had two floors. Four flats on the bottom floor and four flats at the top. At the right side of the building, a barely there white staircase design to be used only by the tiniest and slimmest of humans led you to an open-air balcony on the second floor, where the petite bird stood above chirping in silence. Her goal to be heard proved to be too much for her and the little bird’s heart stopped.

The building resembled a ghost house on the verge of complete exhaustion. One more scare, and poof no more boo’s. Not many lived in the ghost pad. On rare days, you would see an anxious man hastily walking off to his office job caring ruffled pieces of paper held desperately to his chest, or a dim woman caring a basket as she heads towards the market, tugging the hand of her five year old son. The young boy never played outside or went to school because both parents considered him slow; something bane to the boy’s father. Scornful people – an honest joy not to be seen. The ghost house suited its tenants. The wraithlike complex was ran by a Mongolian woman in her 50’s but her looks resembled a lady in late 20’s. Too bad her old folk wisdom and the creases circling her eyes ruined the illusion. Nonetheless a sight to see she remained. A reason to visit the ghostlike complex was to see the beautiful Mongolian woman wrap in dewy tan skin. Skin that she dressed in a long black skirt, while the top half carried a clean print top that hid underneath a lamb hair coat dyed to resemble a Tiger’s eye gemstone, and red marbles, beaded into a necklace tossed around her neck. The beads had gold inscription on their surface, in what we could concluded was an outdated language maybe demotic Greek? Her high cheekbones shined under the sun parallel with her ebony loose braid which lightly patted her back as she walked, constantly reassuring her. The eye’s feast she was . In the corner of her own eyes she saw a yellow spec hit the ground. She picked up the life-less canary, and places its beak between her fingers and broke it off. She tossed the dead bird aside and kept the beak in her hand. The yellow canary will not be miss, nothing that lived there was.