Flash Fiction No.3

It felt good being human again.

The girl in the cafe flexed her fingers around the fork she was holding. The girl wasn’t strong but she would do until Echo could change bodies. Maybe an older model would suit her better. She looked across at the girl’s father and smiled sweetly. He didn’t notice. He just kept on eating his pie with its thick crust of glutinous death attached. Echo didn’t have that problem. Her eyes glittered and she sliced at the girl’s meagre helping of fruit sundae. The raspberries burst in her mouth like ripened orgasms of juice. It dripped over her lips and she sucked it in slowly.

She hadn’t tasted something as succulent as this in years. Praised were the powers that had returned her to Earth. A soft sigh fell from the borrowed girl’s lips. These creatures didn’t know what they had. Echo rolled her shoulders, moaned softly and settled back in her chair. This time, the girl’s father looked up. “Sofie, are you alright?”

She smirked. “How old am I?” The man faltered. Echo rolled her eyes, something she’d wanted to do for centuries – it was no fun being a spirit. “It’s not a trick question. What’s the answer?”

“Eighteen…”

She dabbed at the red stains on her lips and remembered the time that she’d inhabited a vampire. That had been fun but the constant craving for blood and sex had turned her stomach. Still, she hadn’t minded being housed in such a body. Perpetual youth was hard to come by without a price. The vampire had become aware, however, and had Echo forced out. That was how she had been thrown back to the root of all things and how she had been hungering to get back to life for centuries. Things had taken a turn for the worse in that despicable place. But… for a price… anything was possible.

And who wouldn’t do anything to be able to smell, taste, touch and, that most exquisite of all, love…?

That was the best thing about being human. You could take pleasure such as that.

She toyed with the fork. “Do I have a boyfriend?”

“Sofie, are you–?”

“Answer the question.”

“I don’t know…” He put down his cutlery. Echo watched from inside his daughter’s body. She had to keep remembering that this was the twenty-first century and not the fifteenth. “Look, if this is some silly game your mother has told you to play with me–”

“I don’t care about your silly little divorce,” she sneered. A cruel grin spread across the girl’s glossed lips. “And I have to leave now… You’ve reminded me what a snivelling race humanity is. I’m going to go and enjoy myself.” A consciousness stretched at the back of the girl’s mind but Echo prodded it back to sleep. When she’d had her fun, she’d move onto the next creature. It might, for example, be nice to inhabit a young man and see life from a different side. Smiling sadistically to herself, the creature strode out of the cafe, ready to cause mischief in the lives of these pathetic beings and enjoy herself like she hadn’t in lifetimes…