Flash fiction by A Allan Chibi
The archivist
Cork, Present Day.
The rain turned the city to shadowed glass. Clíodhna Feldman sat in the archives, watching mist creep across the River Lee. The air felt wrong, too still, too thick, like paper soaked in old breath. Each keystroke echoed louder than it should, as if tapping the lid of a coffin.
The obituary blinked onto the screen. Harold Simms, 47, sudden exsanguination in Toronto. No evidence of foul play.
Simms. A name she had flagged years ago in a Hampshire record from the 1500s. She had dismissed it as coincidence. But then came the others: Vermont, Dakar, Tasmania. All descended from a militia that razed an Irish village in 1494. All deaths by blood loss. All called natural.
She opened her private logbook and wrote beneath the red heading: Lineage 12C – Mallow Incident.
Later, at dinner, an elderly woman leaned close, her eyes flickering like moths against flame.
“You’ve seen the pattern,” she said.
Clíodhna nodded.
“Archivists call it the Red Thread. It moves through bloodlines like a needle through flesh, sealing wounds not to heal but to hush. Those who see it are marked. Those who feel it are already sewn in.”
Clíodhna swallowed. “Who is he?”
“He was fae once. Then something older bound him. Now he walks among us with purpose. He is the blade of a promise kept to gods no longer worshipped.”
Clíodhna thought of her dream: a man in a black suit, cane tapping, fog swallowing him whole.
“He doesn’t kill innocents,” the woman added. “Only the blood‑guilty. Only those who carry the line of the massacre.”
“And me?”
“Because you remember. Because your people kept the Book when others forgot.”
When Clíodhna finally saw him, the rain bent around his body. His hat cast no shadow. A busker’s saxophone spat a discordant note as he passed, and a dog blocks away began to howl.
Black linen suit. Ivory shirt. Panama hat. The cane shimmered briefly, eagle‑headed, then plain again. Its rhythm matched her heartbeat. He turned, nodded once, and kept walking.
The nod echoed down her spine. Recognition, not of her name, but of her role.
That night she logged another death. Bridget McHale, 38, Durban. Hampshire blood. No family. The body collapsed inward, veins shriveled to black threads, mouth open in silence, eyes peeled wide as if they had seen something vast before the blood turned to vapor.
Clíodhna whispered a prayer, then closed the file.
Her dreams were not quiet but silent, as if the world itself had stopped listening. No wind, no voices, no cane tapping. Only the sensation of something stitching beneath her skin.
When she woke, red pinpricks marked her wrists, constellations she did not recognize.
Andrew A. Chibi is a Canadian historian of Early Modern British and European history, author, and educator whose work explores the complex religious and political dynamics of Tudor England and the European Reformation. As an historian, his work includes Henry VIII’s Conservative Scholar, The Wheat and the Tares, and Fear God, Honor the King. Under the pen name A. Allan Chibi, his fiction works include novels such as The Unprofitable Servant and the first two volumes of The Saga of the Stolen One series. Short fiction has appeared in Altered Reality Magazine and in House of Long Shadows among others. He is known for combining rigorous historical research with compelling storytelling, appealing to scholars and general readers alike. He currently lives in Windsor, Ontario.
