This is a flash piece I wrote almost a year ago. I believe the prompt was “concrete”.

The Harsh Light of Day

They found me in the shade of the car-park overhang, all eager smiles and hard eyes. The sounds of breaking glass tinkling through the warm air were my first warning.

“Oi. Fairy!”

I looked for an escape route but it was sunny and I wasn’t desperate enough. Yet.

“C’mere. Got a present for you.”

Present? I doubt it. No future that’s for sure. I cursed them under my breath. Not that it meant anything now. Not like the old days.

They came at me running, with chrome-plated boots and shards of mirrored glass. They call them the shiny boys. Fancy themselves scourge of my kind.

My kind. Once held in wonder, and fear. Mystery was our habitat but their kind destroyed it, along with the rain forests and polar ice-caps. Their pushing inquisitiveness, their blunt weapon of science forced us out of the shadows, out of dark corners, out from the fringes and edges, into the light.

Now they know us and our weakness.

They flashed their mirrors, reflected rays slicing and spearing me. I pushed back against the wall of stone behind.

But it wasn’t stone, nothing so natural.

Wondering why they hate us I felt myself sink into it. Perhaps we bring to mind half-remembered notions that they feared. Or longed for.

Suffocating in the steel reinforced pillar I realise: we make their worst nightmares, and best lost dreams, real.

Flimsy as my body is — even light will pierce it — it’s too concrete for them.