Twilight's Flash Fiction / Relatos cortos crepusculares

The Visit of Infinity I woke up early, as I did every morning, ready to go to work. When I tried to sit up, I realized I couldn't move. For a moment, I thought I was still dreaming. Wake up, I told myself. I looked up at the ceiling. Then my eyes wandered across the pictures on the walls and toward the window. Wait a moment. There should have been a wardrobe beside it. There was nothing. Everything beyond the window was black. Half the room had become a black space, and the door had disappeared into it. Even if I managed to stand up, I thought, there would be no way out. Then, unexpectedly, I succeeded. At the same time, I watched the black space continue advancing until the entire room had been reduced to a single point of light. A strange point that never ceased to shine. Amid the deepest darkness, the point of light drifted toward me. Then I heard it laugh. It seemed amused by my bewilderment. It came closer... and closer... until it swallowed me. Inside t...

The Sad Smile The abandoned house smelled of damp. The wallpaper was beginning to peel away from the walls. A vast skylight bathed the exotic plants, brought from the most remote corners of the world, in pale light. No one had watered them for days. Their owner had vanished without a trace. In the luxurious drawing room, above an exquisite marble fireplace, hung a large and enigmatic portrait. A faint smile and a sorrowful gaze on the face of a beautiful woman conveyed the unsettling certainty of an inescapable destiny. The portrait depicted the matriarch of a celebrated family of composers. Decades earlier, she had driven her youngest son's fiancée to suicide. That had happened many years before. Now the youngest son, sole heir to the family's fortune, had disappeared as well. The investigators returned to the house several times over the following days. At first, the changes were almost imperceptible. First... the hair changed. The following day... the eyebrows....

The Carrier He rdoesn't remember very well when he began as a carrier. When he had barely learned to walk, he began carrying a small basket full of bricks to help his family build the hut, and his hands became accustomed to receiving and giving. Later, when he was a big boy, he would carry big jugs of water for long distances. Water, for his family, for the village neighbours who were already very old... When he was surprised by the war, he was a teenager, he also had to act as a porter. He carried messages from one side to the other, in the trenches. Messages from one brother to another. Desperate messages, messages of hope, messages of brotherly love... before dying ones in each other's hands. He became an educated young man. And he continued to act as a porter. He learned to live in the big city and to distinguish between those who gave and those who received, and he was the common thread between them. This time it was about affection. He also learned that there are peo...

The Monastery At the witching hour, the monastery loomed against the fading light as an exhausted traveller approached its gate. He grasped the heavy iron knocker and struck the ancient door. Then he waited. And waited. Finally, he knocked again. Slowly, the hinges groaned as the massive door creaked open. A small man, his face deeply pitted by smallpox, peered out from beneath the hood of his habit and silently beckoned him inside. "I am Fray Ernesto, from the Abbey of Cadbury. The prior is waiting for me." "The prior died this morning. We are keeping vigil over his body. Tomorrow he will be buried here." Brother Ernesto, out of his mind, replied to the friar: "It's not possible! He was having to give me some very important documents." "Come with me and you will see for yourself." They passed through the dark cloister, dimly lit by the torch carried by the friar. The room, a naked cell, housed the lifeless body of a yo...