prompt: chance, title: forever after in misc. flash fiction

“Hello everyone,” the middle-aged man rose to stand behind the particleboard podium, in front of a disused chalkboard, in the most obscure room of a church’s basement, “my name’s Joe and I’m a recovering Chosen One.” “Hi Joe!” the assembled seven people in their semi-circle of ten folding chairs responded in near-lockstep union. This wasn’t new to them. They knew that drill.

The others then rose with Joe, some setting their coffee cups or water bottles on the floor beside them. “Fate,” they chanted as rote in a better synch than Joe’s greeting, “grant me the awareness of what I can no longer change, pride in the things I have changed, and your grace to understand the difference between prophecy and myself.” That last part was the biggest struggle of them all.

Balthazar, for example, was endowed with a limited form of immortality by a bog crone, told he would save an entire town’s worth of life with it despite its terrible burden. He could not age and he could not contract disease, though he could die by an external cause or other random chances. After roughly one-hundred-and-forty years, he did just that, as the only un-infectious courier for his community during one of the Black Plagues. No holy war, no magic sword, just a handful of hundreds of souls preserved by his immunities. But after his purpose was served? He didn’t die.

Or Sally, born with a tiny amount of telekinetic ability, but foretold to slay some terrible monster. When the school for teenage superhumans she attended was assailed, it turned out the villain was only vulnerable to internal attacks, so she clamped down his carotid artery with just a few PSI of pressure and killed him. Of course, her classmate the super-strong fop called “Bro Pummel” just happened to be socking the antagonist in the mouth as it happened, so everyone thought Bro did it. On her second divorce at thirty-six and running out of casinos that haven’t banned her for her “lucky streaks” at the craps and roulette tables, she’s the member whose cup hovered two inches above the well-worn wall-to-wall-carpeting, never spilling a solitary drop.

Nevermind ‘Crazy Steve’ who they were all certain didn’t actually go back in time, to stop an alien invasion, awaking in a repaired timeline where no one remembered but him. Whether it happened or not though, the trauma of being beyond his purpose was real, doesn’t matter how that purpose itself may’ve been imagined. They were there for each other, and there for Steve.

Twice a month, they came together to talk through it, with the kind of folks who’d believe them
or at least believed their pain, as they had it too. It’s a hell of a thing to outlive your purpose, but it’s better than dying with it. They had to believe it, just to keep on living. Maybe they are not so different from us, after all. Don’t tell them that, though. They don’t wanna hear about it.