The Pouch
Clara held onto the small pouch on the bus ride from St. Paul to St. Cloud. Why were so many towns around here named for saints? Dense fog shrouded the bus as if to confuse it, send it off course. This was good. It matched the subterfuge of her task.
What was in that pouch?
She caressed its stitches. Her task was to deliver it, quietly, from one university laboratory to another.
Professor Mark Higgins: “Deliver this to Professor Sandra Driskill.” A stern look. “Do not open it!”
The man in the seat in front of her reached up to stretch with the hairiest arms she had ever seen. She imagined a fictional world in which intelligent apes behaved like humans. She envisioned the sympathetic characters and the cretins on the human side, whose prejudice would get in the way of reasonable thinking. She thought of the resulting tragedies. And then she realized the story had already been told.
What was in that pouch?
At the next stop, more people got on the bus and she was squashed in next to a woman with a small dog in a carrier that she held on her lap. The dog shivered.
The bus came to the outskirts of St. Cloud. Just like that, they emerged through the ghostly swamp of fog and were set free above its clutches. They rumbled through town to the campus. Perhaps just one peek. She uncinched the drawstrings. It was rose petals. And a tiny love note.
Thank you for reading my 250-word micro-fiction story. Your comments are welcome!
I wrote this story when I ran a weekly micro-fiction writing contest, and I would also often contribute my own piece, just for fun. This story was my piece for the prompt, “stitch.”
In this story, I attempted to add a non-linear element that somewhat shakes the story from its linear course. It was an experiment in supporting the character’s development to show something about the character without telling it in words. In this case, the idea was to show that the character has a rich imagination, which affects her judgment. What do you think?