Twilight's Flash Fiction / Relatos cortos crepusculares

The King's Coachman He has been a palace coachman for almost twenty years and barely exchanged a few words with his majesty when he entered his service. During all those years he has followed the instructions of the King's aid in his displacements, either for the king to hunt in the forests near the Palace or to travel for days to distant countries accompanied by the royal procession. Sometimes he would go weeks or months without seeing his daughter. Today he could barely hide it. In vain he tried to repress the tears when he learned of the fatal illness of his daughter. Unexpectedly, the voice of the King's aid rang out loudly. "Coachman, stop!" When the carriage had stopped, the king got out and addressed the coachman. "Every year on this day, for twenty years, you cry bitterly because you relive the loss of your daughter. Today, on the anniversary of her death, your spirit dresses up in that moment twenty years ago and draws your present." "After...

  The Revenge of the Gardens The gardens, abstracted from everything that was not their own beauty, fed on the feelings of their visitors, extracted all their energy to finally leave them inert on the ground. Thus the centuries passed until Cyrus the Great decided to invade Babylon, enter his capital, Babylon, and visit the gardens. Ciro, faced with that indescribable beauty, stayed speechless and for an instant lost his sense of reality, while the gardens prepared their own revenge from him. When Ciro woke up, a security guard stopped him, put him in the car and took him to the police station for being inappropriately dressed and disturbing public order. The gardens had banished him in time to the twenty-first century. Los jardines abstraídos de todo lo que no fuera su propia belleza, se alimentaban de los sentimientos de sus visitantes, les extraía toda su energía para finalmente dejarlos inertes en el suelo. Así fueron pasando los siglos en Babilonia hasta que Ciro el Grande dec...

 Flight 675-AH The aircraft on which I have been travelling from Madrid to Cape Town has just landed. I am the only passenger who has returned. When we took off, there wasn't a single empty seat. About two hours into the flight, at an altitude of thirty-five thousand feet, the aircraft began to lose speed while maintaining its altitude, until, a few minutes later, it came to a complete stop, suspended in midair. The flight attendant announced over the intercom that the cabin was being depressurized and that the oxygen masks would be deployed. Through the window, I could see what looked like an enormous lenticular cloud. When the masks dropped, I was the only passenger who put one on. Everyone else rose from their seats and proceeded calmly toward the exit. Then, from the lenticular cloud, a kind of walkway emerged and extended all the way to the aircraft door. One by one, the passengers stepped out and walked along it toward the cloud. Once everyone had disembarked, the walkway ret...

 Mother She is heaven and earth, the beginning and the end, the rain, the sun, and joy. She is every good thought, the truth, and life itself. She is the blue of the sky and the gentle mornings of childhood. She is the endless sea and the infinite stars that shine in every moment. She is everything. Mi madre Ella es el cielo y la tierra, el principio y el fin, la lluvia, el sol y la alegría.  Ella es todo pensamiento bueno, la verdad y la vida.  Es el azul del cielo y las mañanas dulces de la niñez.  Es el mar infinito y las infinitas estrellas de cada instante.  Es todo.

 Vibrations Two old friends, one of them an inhabitant of a hydrogen atom in a water molecule, and the other a being from the Andromeda galaxy, met at the midpoint of the universe to chat about the future. One of them commented: the only difference between a galaxy and an atom is size. For example, we are very similar. For eons we have met for taking beers and our points of view are very similar. The other added: it has always been like this. I remember that even before the universe was created, everything was a question of vibrations. In the case of humans, the waves materialize in bodies of flesh and blood. Souls peer into the world through the bodies that occupy the interstices of nothingness. And they think that light has the secret of relativity. However they do not know that the center of the universe is each one of them and that is why they cannot find the center. Vibraciones Dos viejos amigos, uno de ellos habitante de un átomo de hidrógeno de una molécula de agua, y el otr...

Large Hadron Collider The large particle collider has exploded, dividing the Earth globe into two equal halves, rotating between them and leaving to see the bowels of the Earth . We called the emergency room of hospital for someone to come home to save our lives. A woman's voice answered the call. Her voice cracked as she answered. They needed more help than us. The ambulances had left and the hospital lights had decided to abandon every room of every hospital. My interlocutor burst into tears and I told her that we would go help them. That we would bring a large package of electricity that we had in the pantry and that we would leave our car with them. The woman wouldn't stop crying and, after crying for a while, I also hung up the phone. El gran colisionador de hadrones El gran colisionado de partículas ha estallado, dividiendo el globo terráqueo en dos mitades iguales, girando entre ellas y dejando al descubierto las entrañas de la Tierra. Llamamos a urgencias para que algui...

  Silk Her soul is silk. She wraps you in her sweetness and, without even knowing it, breaks the silence of loneliness. Such is the death of every day, giving way to a thousand dawns. Heartbreak. Dreams. Tiny diabolical thoughts. Great plans. Sorrows that fit inside a thimble. Joys as vast as the oceans. And, at the end of the day... a taste of life's eternal light, which wraps you once more in her silken soul, until the following day.   Seda Su alma es seda. Te envuelve en su dulzura y, sin saberlo, rompe el silencio de la soledad. Así muere cada día, para dar paso a mil amaneceres al día siguiente. Desamores. Sueños. Pequeños pensamientos diabólicos. Grandes planes. Penas que caben en un dedal. Alegrías inmensas como los océanos. Y, al final del día... un sabor a la eterna luz de la vida, que vuelve a envolverte en su alma de seda, hasta el siguiente día.

   Forgetfulness He was sentenced to life imprisonment and never knew how he got to that narrow cell. With no electric light, a small window near the ceiling let him know if it was day or night. To combat forgetfulness, he counted the days by making a small mark in his prayer book with each sunset. He had always hoped that he could escape, and his mind was on how to do it through that window. After many days and endless attempts, he managed to get to it and tried to break the glass. That was when he realized that it wasn't a window. It was a screen that simulated the passage of days. Surprised by that discovery, he repeatedly hit the screen hard, until it broke into a thousand pieces. Unexpectedly, a huge force pushed his body outwards and a sharp pain in his shoulders made him scream. The scream did not reach his ears because the air had disappeared. He was trapped in the gap of what was supposed to be a window. Then, after seeing the intense black of space, he knew that he...

 The Greenhouse When I was a child, I used to play in the greenhouse. I used to imagine that behind those huge callas, tiny beings lived, some hairy, others beardless, accompanied by fairies and nymphs. Nearby lived orchids of a deep pink color, which contrasted with the lush green of the stems of slender red roses. So, thinking of those little beings and how to make their lives easier, I dedicated myself to building them some small wooden houses in which I had everything necessary to make them feel comfortable. One cold morning I sneaked into the greenhouse. The raindrops slid down the glass roof and their melodious presence called nature to pray. Suddenly, from inside one of the little houses, there slipped a sound that I interpreted as a nervous but friendly greeting. H e was a delightful little creature.   He was called Shzum. He confessed to me that he was the spirit of Mozart. And with the rest of his companions, also spirits of musicians, they were performing eternal co...

  The Wood Carving On a trip to learn about life in Tanzania, an aboriginal man approached me suspiciously and showed me a wood carving. His pleading eyes asked me to give him something for that piece of art. A warrior was preparing his spear to hunt a lion. It was a crude wood carving, naïve, but there was something inexplicable about it that made one look at it unhurriedly. That same night when I went to the tent to sleep, I took the carving with me and placed it next to the pillow. As I gazed at it, I fell asleep. I had a horrible nightmare in which a lion was attacking me and luckily, a warrior similar to the one in the wood carving came out of the thicket and faced the lion, saving my life. The following morning I woke with a sharp pain in my side. He had a deep wound that appeared to have been caused by a lion's claw. I looked at the wood carving and the warrior lay bloodied and badly wounded, while the lion was preparing to end his life. La talla  En un viaje para ...