Free Tide of Shadows and Other Stories by Aidan Moher Page A

far above the short reach of my arms. But I need only one today.
    I race home, clutching the bright treasure tight to my chest. Alaga runs beside me. The gleam of Nini's approval glows in the storm of thought, memory, and imagination that lives behind my eyes. My Nini often says that it’s small things that make life wonderful; but the treasure wrapped in my hands is no small thing. The ghostly sweet taste of persimmon juice tickles my tongue. I know my Nini will share a bite on her birthday.
    Because she is love and generosity and all good things.

“The Colour of the Sky on the Day the World Ended” (2013)
    Story Notes

    Even the smallest stories are whole universes hidden in words.
    “The Colour of the Night on the Day the World Ended” is particularly compact. At only a smidge under 700 words, I decided that I wanted to see how much character and world-building I could fit into one piece of flash fiction. Words are cheap. It’s easy to lay out the intricacies of a world when you have a limitless canvas.
    If a novel is like taking a cruise liner through a new world, a piece of flash fiction is like looking at that same expansive universe through a pinhole. It’s all there, but you can only see a small, focused bit of it. There’s both a liberty and a sense of challenge that comes from the limitations posed by a miniature word count. It forces a writer to be concise and creative. With waste comes excess—remove that and all that is left behind is pure story.
    I wrote “The Colour of the Night on the Day the World Ended” over the course of an evening at a local cafe. I sat down with the nameless protagonist across from me and asked for her story. I thought it was going to be a story about her, the end of the world, and a persimmon. As her story unfolded before me word by word, I realized that this wasn’t her story—it belonged to someone else entirely: her Nini. So many great questions abound about that lovely woman, and this small story only makes the barest scratches on the surface of the answers.
    Such surprises make writing an intoxicating experience.

Tide of Shadows

My mother's flat palm slammed into my chest, hard enough to send me tumbling backwards, gasping for breath as I hit hard-packed ground. Pain shot up my arm as I came down on my slender wrist, shattering bone.
    "Go," she yelled. Her back was turned to me now, and her spear stabbed at darkness, keeping at bay the tide of shadows that rolled over our village. The shadow beasts cried out as she struck out at them, with all the force and precision of a master hunter, but there were so many. Too many.
    "Go!" Her spear stabbed and stabbed. She screamed something else, but her words were lost before they reached me. I scrambled up from the ground, clutching my broken wrist against my chest. The beat of thumping footfalls, running as fast as any eight-year-old ever had, joined the sound of my racing heart, of my mother's cries, and the wet stabbing sounds of her spear.
    I ran through the nursery, all the way to the back where the small sky pod had sat unused for as long as I'd been alive.
    I was the last of the children to scramble into the sky pod. The door shut behind me, airtight in seconds. Engines engaged. All the children were crying, calling for their parents. Tears tickled my dirt-streaked cheeks.
    Airborne. Space-bound. Uwe'hhieyth fell away beneath our feet.

    15 years later

    438 days 00:01:23 until drop

    "She's beautiful," Rummage said. She held a holophoto of my mother, who was laughing in that full-bellied way that only happens in the company of loved ones. Her brown eyes were a lot like this girl's, who I'd brought back to my quarters after a date on the solar deck. I hadn't noticed that until then, but the similarity was startling.
    "She was," I replied. The constant hum of the starship filled the space left by the word. Like a living thing, the ship had a rhythm that filled its every corner, a warmth and security as fleeting and