Another day in the life

Dusk fell. It had been a quiet and pleasant day of the year 1834, and life at Stattford had passed normally –too normally, perhaps-, untouched by any unbidden event. However, Phineas was under the impression that something unusual was going to happen. It had to. He did not know why he felt it, but he was quite sure. He did not know what would happen either, but such a day couldn’t just end so calmly.
Phineas was a rural worker and, as many in this little village, he had never hoped for anything extraordinary to happen in his life. On the contrary, he had ever desired to have a very simple day-to-day living with a lot of work during the day and a proper hot meal at night with the company of a fair wife and two or three children. And life had always met those expectations. Nevertheless, at the age of forty he had begun to long for surprises in his life, and asked more from it. He wanted unexpected events. Desperately. Routine had become tedious for him. Two years before, despite he had always wanted his children to achieve that longed progress he had never reached, he had –however dubiously- permitted Phil, his eldest son, to become a rural worker as him. Although this wasn’t the best he had hoped for his firstborn, he comforted himself by considering it a gift to vary his days a bit.
Anyway, life had followed its course and some time after his desires had changed, as father and son were approaching the forest in which their house laid, nothing singular had happened yet. It then befell something that most people wouldn’t have hesitated in characterizing as devil-like. For them, it could have been a noise not so common but neither unlikely in the woods. However, they stirred nervously when they heard that scream, because its source wasn’t an animal but a human being, and most likely a woman. That’s how Phineas’ mind, which hadn’t been preoccupied by anything extraordinary in all its life, started being disrupted by a quite high grade of discomfort.
His concern was such that he was soon looking desperately for this woman. Before starting the search, he had told Phil to go home and explain his wife that he would be out for some time, perhaps long, until he found the source of the scream. Hours passed and Phineas wasn’t any closer to finding her than when he had begun. However, he relentlessly kept looking for her and said to himself that he wouldn’t stop wandering in the woods until he managed to discover what had happened to that woman. As midnight came, he became aware that he had reached a part of the forest in which trees grew more separate and clearings became more frequent. He then started to persistently notice that there were blood stains in the grass. This made him become a lot more nervous and preoccupied than before and the idea of a crime started haunting his imagination. In spite of that, he carried on with his search, now aware that he was closer to the source of his distress. Suddenly, out of the blue and as Phineas was trying to guess how much time he had spent walking throughout the woods, a flash of light hit him directly into his eyes, coming from a distance of about a hundred meters. After recovering from that blinding light, he started running forward, sure that the end of his wanderings was near. When he reached the place from where it had come, he found something that would have astonished anyone but him. There, before his eyes, and without any kind of possible explanation, was a strange creature with which he had dreamt when he was a child. And it was laughing, laughing loudly, full of joy and happiness. He began to wonder whether what was happening was indeed real.
Phineas started approaching quietly but stepped on a branch, making the creature notice him. What befell could have surprised anyone, even him. The creature raised its hand, closed it on its hair and pulled up a mask. It was his wife, who went on laughing again. He then started laughing merrily and gaily too, as he had never done before. And that was something uncommon and he realized that that wasn’t another day in the life.
Pen-name: The Great Danton
Category C