Ill Met by Moonlight
1149 words long
It's amazing what you can see, if only you look at it from the right angle. And under the right lighting, of course.
Notes from the author:Imagine: A cog-in-the-wheel employee discovers the Shocking Truth about their employers, and what they now see they can never again unsee. That’s not even a plot--that’s a plot template. Any number of stories could be written off that template. Here’s one of them.
Next week’s fictionette, based on a bit of freewriting from June 19, also deals with catching sight of otherworldly creatures out the corner of one’s eye. This one’s revision was probably influenced by the memory of having written that one.
Ted examined the figurine he held in his hand. It was one of hundreds like it that the Cobb Daily Import bought cheaply from markets overseas and sold at a three-hundred percent mark-up in local dollar stores. Or it should have been. Ted looked more closely at the figurine and doubted.
It was a matter angles and lighting. Look at it from the right angle, under the right illumination, and things become clear. Fluorescent lights, on the other hand, were aces at making the extraordinary look ordinary. You could walk a unicorn colt down a dollar store aisle, and no one would say a word beyond “How much is that one?”
Perhaps some store supplied by Cobb Daily Import had, in fact, sold a unicorn colt to someone, somewhere, for a buck ninety-nine. They were clearly selling fairies, so anything was possible. And Ted knew now that Cobb Daily really was distributing live fairies to dollar stores, because under the uncanny light of a fresh full moon at half past one in the morning, and out of the corner of a squinting eye, Ted had caught sight of this very figurine moving.
He slipped it back into his pocket, feeling obscurely betrayed....
This has been an excerpt from the Friday Fictionette for July 10, 2015. Subscribers can download the full-length fictionette (1,149 words) from Patreon in PDF or MP3 format depending on their pledge tier.
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