Tom Duke’s The Season of my Becoming is this week’s flash fiction – live now on the website. It’s a tale of growing up in the winter chill, in all its snarling fury…
Here’s a taste…
My senses are aroused beyond anything I’ve ever experienced. But though my heart is beating to a new, exciting rhythm, my mind has settled on the delicate crunch of half-dried leaves under feet as I follow the narrow path leading out to the clearing’s edge; it’s a small, compressed sound that dies in the surrounding woods, yet reaches my ears like an ancient, seductive whisper.
For the first time in my life I’m utterly alone, not just out for one of my solitary walks in the woods, the walks that up until today I took while my mother—at least that’s who she had always said she was—sat in our cottage behind a small table in the corner, between the fireplace and side window, studying spells and blending potions.
I didn’t realize that over the past two years, as I matured beyond boyhood, she’d been crafting a special gift for my eighteenth birthday; and an accompanying story she would tell on that pivotal day.
Today.