Flash Fiction – Rachel Rodman

He Always Lied, I Always Told the Truth. And Then We Fell in Hate

We had worked at the crossroads for only one solar hour. For a thousand years. And whenever travelers would stop to ask me about the nature of the two paths that extended from the fork that we guarded–“Which leads to Thebes?” or “Which leads to Hell?”–I would point them in the correct direction.

If the travelers ever seemed doubtful, I would advise them to ask the civil servant who was assigned to serve beside me. “Please do listen to him,” I would say. “He ALWAYS tells the truth.”

(That was the rule at the crossroads. You could ask as many questions as you wanted. You could stay all day if that felt right, asking).

The civil servant that served beside me, my crossroads’ partner, would always confirm the answer I had given.

From the first instant of our first meeting, my crossroads’ partner had deeply bored me. These strong feelings likely arose from the fact that he was identical to me in every respect. As time passed, these feelings were intensified by the fact that we had never been introduced to one another and I never spent any time in his company.

Finally, fatigued by the intense nature of my indifference, I said “I think that we should kiss. A hundred times. I think that we should never stop kissing.”                                                                  

He told me that he loathed me.             

“I want to kiss,” I said. Then I folded my arms coldly.

Then we didn’t kiss.

We stood leagues apart, he in Hell and I in Thebes. We remained upright and we did not touch one another, and as we stood that way, never in the least altering our position, he told me that he had always, secretly, wished that it would not come to this; he told me, too, that his most dearly held desire, since the moment our first meeting, was that we would live strictly and permanently isolated from one another, and that we would both die alone.

It was the absence of his touch, perhaps–or the absolute lack of resonance between anything he was describing with any dream I had ever experienced–that suddenly caused me to begin not thinking about our future.

“I am thinking about our future,” I said.

He shrugged apathetically. Then he did not say this: “What would you say that I would say?”

That is why I hated him–questions like that.

This is what I did not say: “You would say: ‘Let us retain our advisory positions at these crossroads. Let us not submit our resignations, nor allow our duties to pass to another, younger pair of government laborers–men who will be not only be equally qualified for these positions but also far hungrier for them.”

He spat at me then.

He clawed out my eyes.                                                         

“I am ecstatic,” I said, one moon later, “that we have decided to run away together. That we have abandoned our repetitive and unfulfilling work at the crossroads, and now live together in our own home, in Thebes. I also experience profound fulfillment in the fact that our professional identities are no longer about others’ questions, but about what we can build: a shop for creative work, where I, in the back, craft bold new art and write implausible stories, and you, in the front, coordinate the sales and speak with the customers. And that every night, for always, we will sleep together, side by side, heart to heart, forever.”

He did not deign to answer.

Such was his scorn.

Now, we never see one other. And every day, every night, within every shared moment, we discover new reasons to despise one another, and new ways to express our growing revulsion.                                        

Now, I think: let a thousand years pass; let the Universe itself wear away, before it will ever again engender two people who are so fundamentally fated to remain so utterly indifferent to one another, or to have so emphatically never met. 

As if the stars have intended it.

This then, O, traveler–you, to whom I am presently relating this story, my least favorite story, from my permanent position at the crossroads, where I am still working and will always be working, a post that I have never left and have never contemplated leaving–constitutes the entirety of my true confession.                                                                                         

A story that has no moral.

I am confident, too, that, in the course of this afternoon, you will enjoy your planned journey to Hell.

That way.