Mayflies

By Lauren K Nixon

The first time Ottie saw Death, she was six years old...

A tale of life, Death and unexpected friendship. To her neighbours, Ottie is a perfectly normal woman. But she is a woman with a secret. One she will take to her grave. More or less.

Mayflies is a gently humorous, touching and moving book about how the bonds of friendship can extend across the largest of gaps, and will make you pause and think about things just that little bit more.
- G. Burton

This was awesome. I loved it. Couldn't stop reading it.
- Val Robertson

This was a nice, subtle, slice of life (and afterlife). It really drew me in.
- Adam G. Smith

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Mysterium
• Release date: Apr 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463274927

Lauren K Nixon

An ex-archaeologist enjoying life in the slow-lane, Lauren K. Nixon is an indie author fascinated by everyday magic.She is the author of numerous short stories and the Chambers Magic series. She also curates the fabulous Short Story Superstars, a vibrant community of writers, whose anthology is now available!Having studied Archaeological Sciences at Bradford University - a truly global subject - Lauren went on to discover that what everyone always told her about there being no jobs in archaeology was quite true. Happily, there are many things to keep her occupied, and when she's not writing she can be found gardening, singing, reading, playing the fool and playing board games.

Book preview

Other Titles

From The Mysterium:

Echoes of the Light

The Fox and the Fool

The House of Vines

With The Superstars:

Title Not Included

Some Assembly Required

Functioning as Intended

Time’s the thief of memory.

- Stephen King

To the well-organised mind, death is but the next great adventure.

- J. K. Rowling

The first time Ottie saw Death, she was six years old.

Oh, there must have been other deaths, she supposed, looking back, but she had been young then and people had been set on ushering her away from unsettling things like sickness and the end of life.

She had had an older sister she had only hazy, cherubic memories of, who had passed away when Ottie had been quite young, and her father’s father had passed away in town when he was away on ‘Business’, whatever that was. But Ottie had not been present for either sad event – or, at least, had been too young to really grasp what was going on. One day her sister was there and the next she wasn’t, and both their parents had been quiet and sad.

When she was six, however, the elderly man who lived in the cottage next to theirs had ‘taken to his bed’, as her father put it, and Ottie and her mother took him his meals, three times a day. He had been a kind man who had no living family, and he had always been in a great deal of pain. His legs hurt him when he walked, which seemed to Ottie a poor reward for a long life well-lived. The old man had struggled to breathe in those last days, and though he had always made an effort to smile at Ottie and her mother when they came in, she could tell that he was afraid.

She heard him speaking haltingly to her mother one day about what might come ‘next’ (at the time, Ottie had presumed he meant after the illness) and how it filled him with dread. It didn’t seem fair to Ottie that someone should be in so much pain and fear if they had never hurt anyone.

And then one day, while Ottie’s mother was reading to the old man from a bundle of letters he had kept in his dresser, bound with a faded blue ribbon, the door to the old man’s small bedroom opened. Ottie turned to see who it was, but neither her mother nor the old man seemed to notice.

The newcomer was a tall, slim man of about her father’s age. He had the same, mud-coloured hair as most of the people in the village and was clean-shaven, dressed simply in clothes that wouldn’t have looked out of place in either town or country. His boots, when she looked, were muddy and a little worn, as though he had had a long ride. He was otherwise unremarkable.

Ottie wondered whether he would turn out to be the old man’s long lost son or something.

No, there was nothing unusual about the man at all, save that her mother hadn’t looked up, or even paused in her reading. The old man, too, seemed oblivious. He had been dozing fitfully before the stranger came in, but now he seemed more peaceful. The newcomer waited, quiet and patient, and Ottie watched. She didn’t want to speak to alert her mother to his presence in case she woke the old man.

They stayed that way for a few minutes, locked in a tableau, until the stranger put his head to one side, as though he was listening closely to something only he could hear. Ottie looked at the old man, who seemed to have settled somehow, as if he had fallen into a deeper kind of sleep and diminished. His skin took on that waxy finish Ottie would later associate with the recently dead.

And then, quite suddenly, there were two old men. There was the one lying on the bed and another, sitting on the edge of it.

The newcomer stepped forward and put a hand on the old man’s shoulder. He looked up, afraid, and peered into the newcomer’s face.

It’s alright, said the newcomer. It’s alright now, Bartholomew.