Friday Flash Fiction – FAZED

Excerpt from FAZED by Bryl R. Tyne

(unedited)

They would have killed me if I’d have stayed . . . .

Those words were the ever-thinning thread I clung to on days like today. Pants ironed, I eyed the pair of black socks sticking out of my dress shoes setting neat and readied behind the door. As I took a sip of coffee, I hit the play button on my recorder in hopes of finishing my presentation for my first class in the morning. Principles of Brain Evolution lay open before me on the desk and my laptop eagerly awaited my fingers to strum over its keys. But as my voice played back to me, my mind was lost in months past.

Just a little over a year ago, I had looked forward to my sabbatical leave, like no other prior. Something about hitting the big “five-O” does that to a man, I guess. Fed up with life, I was tired of teaching, tired of ignorance, and most of all, tired of coming home to an empty apartment. Nothing that a vacation in the low-country of Chili shouldn’t fix, even if only temporarily.

Chili was beautiful, and though I’d joined an expedition into its mountains years before, I decided to go this time for personal reasons. Exploring, uncovering, and discovering ancient civilizations and artifacts were scratched off my agenda. Of all the places I’d traveled,  Chili had some of the finest men I’d ever met–and fucked. More than happy to oblige a non-native as myself on those earlier trips, many were. For the first six months of my sabbatical, I had planned on nothing but searching and exploring the Chilean coasts and villages for willing hot Latino ass.

Besides, inviting another into my boring life, my apartment that almost always set empty even with me in it, simply didn’t seem fair to anyone. When I was home, I was never really there. Always, my mind was either on the next day’s lesson or one of my crazy adventures. Admittedly, I was so wrapped up in my work, I hadn’t the time for a man in my life.

Wasn’t three months into my bronze-ass-abundance vacation, when the come-explore-me bug sunk its teeth deep, hitting bone and refusing to let up. Though from experience I knew exactly where following my gut would get me, I chalked up the feeling, the unrelenting draw toward the mountains, as nothing more than a whim.

Some whim . . .