Flash! Friday Fiction: The Wanderer

Tinogasta, Argentina. Photo courtesy of TPS Dave.
Tinogasta, Argentina. Photo courtesy of TPS Dave.

“The Wanderer” – 319 Words

The sadness settles across my shoulders like an old familiar coat. Like a yoke around my neck. Like the cross I have to bear.

I bring destruction wherever I go. It’s followed me through millenia, since the dawn of time.

Atlantis. Pompeii. The Great Fire of London. The Titanic. The list goes on and on.

I thought this time was different. It’d been twenty years. Twenty years of peace in this tiny village, so remote, so removed from the rest of the world. I thought maybe, just maybe, she had forgotten, had forgiven. Maybe, just maybe, I’d atoned for my sins.

I’d risked it; I’d settled down, had a family. Now they, too, lie beneath the sand that had enveloped them in a flash, like so many before them.

This was my fault. Mine.

I’ve tried to hate. Tried to ice myself out. Tried to live alone. But the drive has always been stronger, the hunger beyond my control.

She made sure of that, on that mountain top an eternity ago. It was the price I had to pay for taking her, for seducing her, for rejecting her.

“You will sow only pain, reap only sorrow. You will pray for death. It will not come for you.”

This is my curse; to seek love knowing I can never have it. To find love knowing I can never keep it. All the while knowing whoever gets close…

I can’t voice it, can’t warn them. Can’t control it. I cannot stop the liquid words from pouring out of my mouth, cannot control the intoxicating magic emanating from my eyes. They’re like moths to the flame.

I am a magnet, attracting those I should repel and repelling those I should attract.

Bring me the monsters, the murderers, the depraved, the wicked. Not these innocents, time after time.

I am The Wanderer. I get around. But this is nothing like the Dion song.

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