Clutter

2020 A.D.

A jet-black convertible sped towards the locked gates. 

"Sweetiepie, no! I have the combination!" 

"No time." The driver graveled, before the car plowed into the gate, knocking it down. 

"Medea Suzanna Mettle!" 

1980 A.D.

"Look kiddo," Henry, a 47 year old college Administrative assistant to a now bankrupted college, tossed something old to his son. "An instrument, just like you wanted."

Clark, his teenage son, caught it. He turned it in his hands.

"What the hell, is this a recorder? Dad, I'm not in fourth grade."

"You can learn sheet music, again, with that and if you get decent then we'll talk about that expensive drum kit you want."

"This is garbage."

"True! It's been sitting in a professor's office for like 100 years, so its at least antique garbage. It has an ancient prophecy attached to it. Here it is..." Henry dug into his pocket and pulled out a paper. He waved it out. "Here's the song."

"What song?"

"I don't know, the song. The song from the folktale." 

Clark tentatively took the sheet from his father and stared blankly at the notated music, which he couldn't read. 

"The dork professor who had the office said that song is supposed to save the world." Henry slide open the glass door that lead to his backyard and pool. "So I guess in a way its the only song that matters."

2020 A.D.

The driver swerved to a stop in front of a large storage unit. She didn't bother opening the door; convertibles were for jumping out of. "Mom, keys!" Medea barked.

"Lesse..." She lifted out a set of keys, then frowned. "No, these are for the pottery studio. Silly." Instead of setting the keys aside, she tossed them back into the purse and kept looking.

Sonic booms screeched through the air above as fighter jets cut through the clouds.

Medea snatched the purse from her mother and tipped it upside down onto the concrete. Medea plucked three sets of keys from the ground and held them up to her mother.

"Which set?" She barked.

"The one with the gray thingie at the top." Her mother muttered. "Medea, that was very rude of you."

"The mess doesn't matter. If we don't stop the end of the world no one will notice and if we DO stop the apocalypse no one will care." The padlock fell away and Medea tossed it aside. She knelt, yanked on the door, and threw it rolling into the ceiling. 

 May 1st, 1995 A.D.

usenet group

Ancient Artifacts and Arcane Knowledge

DrumBoy posted

Anyone can help? I got this from a university's indian studies department a long time ago. It's like a flute? But I don't know what its made out of. 

SunGodsKid

Plastic? Are you sure it wasn't made in a factory? Sometimes they mass produce crap in China and ship it to the tourist spots.

DrumBoy

Its not plastic. I tried setting it on fire, smashing it, I drove my car over it. It's not glass either. It's not metal. I don't know what it is. You cant see it but it also has these lights.

SunGodsKids

What tribe?

DrumBoy

I don't know. It'd been sitting in storage for a century when I got it. 

SunGodKids

That's not very useful. Probably fake.  

DrumBoy

There was also this note. It has some music on it. I've tried playing the song and my dog doesn't like it and it turns off the TV but that's about it

SunGodsKid

I'll buy it. Flute and note. $20

DrumBoy

What is it?

SunGodsKid

I collect anything associated with the apocalypse and the writing on that note says the scholar who took it from the tribe says its for stopping the end of the world. I want it. $20

DrumBoy

$600

SunGodsKid

What? You drove a car over it!!! $50 max.

SunGodsKid

Are you prepared to use it to stop the end of the world if this turns out of the be the one prophecy in a million that is right?. Sell it to me and do yourself a favor.

DrumBoy

End of the world sounds rad. Very metal. $850

SunGodsKid

Listen up, last warning, sell it to me for $50 or I'll just come take it.

DrumBoy

OooooOOoooooo Internet Tough Guy. Maybe I'll just use it to wipe my butt and then we'll see how much you're willing to pay for it.

DrumBoy

Hello?

2020 A.D.

"I don't understand why you didn't just keep it in your house." Medea growled.

"That collection of Nazi doomsday weapon blueprints you sent me took up all of my potato and pot cabinets and thensome. I had to put your trinkets somewhere else. I don't complain because I know you can't keep it since your missions have you jetsetting-"

Medea flung a shelf of cookbooks, just to see if anything would roll out of their pages or was hidden behind them. 

"I was so excited about teaching you to cook..." Susan half-smiled. "I bought some of these when you were still in my tummy."

"Waste of trees. When I wanted to learn, I did what any sensible person would and went to the experts. I just asked to shadow the best baker in town and then spent that summer shadowing at that Gourmet french place in the city." She grunted, backing into a sofa and shoving it out of the way. A handful of fashion dolls, still in the boxes, were revealed. Medea heaved a toy oven, still wrapped in plastic, out of the storage unit. The tiny lightbulb inside shattered as it landed next to the books. 

An explosion rumbled above them.Medea grabbed Susan's arm and pulled her into the storage unit. Seconds later the airplane they'd heard explode rained down on the roof in tiny fragments. A sheet of metal from somewhere on the destroyed vessel embedded itself in the hood of Medea's car.

"Oh, your pretty car..." Her mom mumbled.

"It's fine, I have a dozen of them. Let's look through this crap."

 1835 A.D.

"Don't look," Her thoughts warned. She was frozen between the jagged rocks, her bare feet bleeding. The air in the desert was freezing at night, it ate all the way into her bones. The moon hung like an iceberg across the distant ridges. But behind her wasn't cold. Behind her was too warm. 

She glanced over her shoulder. Soldiers in wool uniforms with sun burnt skin stood around her village. They stayed far away from the flames; they weren't at risk of catching the fire, but near enough to take pot shots at the people fleeing. 

She ran, the flute tethered to her waist, the only thing she'd had time to save, bounced as she ran. She hoped her infant brother would forgive her in the afterlife.

2020 A.D. 

The extraterrestrial invasion descended from above, languidly obliterating Earth's missiles that kept darting at it like a frog picking off flies. Medea lifted another cardboard box, it's folded bottom gave out, and postcards spilled across the concrete floor. 

Her mom dug around in a box of stuffed animals, giving each one a little squeeze before setting it aside. She laid a moldy duck down on a warped coffee table and knelt beside the postcards.

"Oh, these are from your Grandma's 20th Anniversary trip to Hawaii-" She sentimentally flipped through the many cards with palm fronds, luas, and stuck pigs over barbeque pits through her fingers. "She finally got to see the ocean after wishing her whole life. You saw it when you were three, of course. You wrote to that astronomer and they insisted on flying you out to use that giant telescope at the Onizuka center..." Her mother set the cards down. They slid and she knelt to pick them back up, but just then the ground rumbled as the downtown strip of the nearby city was hammered with rail darts.

 Clouds of dust and debris rolled towards them. Medea yanked down the garage-style door to the storage unit before the rolling wave hit. The dance of pebbles bouncing off of the steel played a song just for them that echoed through the pitch black concrete and aluminium room.

Medea shone her flashlight around the room. She stuck it in a novelty collector's cup from a gas station so light bounced off of the ceiling and spilled all around like a lamp. 

"Mom, focus! The world is at stake here." She barked.

"You didn't like ice cream, but you did love to swim. You collected so many little shells and catalogued them all with teeny tiny little placards. So cute," Susan said wistfully. She opened up another box and dug through it. She let out a small gasp. 

Medea turned.

"Did you find the flute?"

1900 A.D. 

He was 11, and his knuckles were bleeding. He'd been working all day sewing clothes, as he had the day before and the day before and almost all the other days since he'd been dragged from his home and his family and enrolled in this 'school'. They'd been sore then, but then he had mouthed off and they'd rapt the cane across his hands until the knuckles burst like ripe pimples on the other students faces.

"Are you willing to admit you were wrong?" The Headmaster asked from behind his desk. The window was behind him and the sunbeams left him a void in their dusty rays. 

"Yes," the boy repented, staring down at the blot clotting on his brown hands.

"Do you accept the Bible as the one and only gospel truth?"

"Yes," The boy lied. The boy knew the end would be hawks who did not flap their wings and the snakes that spat fire from their bellies. The boy knew the only thing that could stop the end was the flute sewn into his pillow. He'd get through this as long as he never forgot that. 

1995 A.D., June

Susan ran through the shopping mall, calling her daughter's name. Three hours ago Medea was safe and snug in her Cineplex seat, bucket of popcorn on her lap, already sticky cup of soda in her tiny hand, ready to watch Pocahontas for the fifth time. Susan and her husband Harold would go the Hard Rock Cafe and enjoy a meal alone. It was all arranged so neatly. With a promise to meet at the book store after the meal or movie, both parties had scampered off with excitement. 

Susan and Harold waddled over to the bookstore 90 minutes later, only to find it absent of Medea. Figuring maybe she'd gotten distracted at the arcade between the theater and the book store, they'd wandered over to the romantic advice shelf like a pair of giggly teenagers. That was fun for all of ten minutes, until Medea still failed to manifest.

   Medea wasn't at the arcade or the cinema. Late night news stories of unspeakable abuses against children by predators played on shuffle through Susan's mind as.

Harold re-assured her with a hand on her shoulder.

"Honey, if there's any fourth grader who can take care of herself, its our girl. She's got an IQ higher than both of us combined and has black belts in Ninjutsu, Karate, and that other one, whats it called, Tie-A-Doe."

Susan rolled her shoulder to knock his hand off.

"All of that's not much good against a gun-" She petered off; entering through the sun-drenched doors behind her husband was a small, familiar silhouette. Medea, her hair in pigtails atop her head jutting up like cats ears, walked into the mall with a jog. 

"Oh, hi mom!" Medea was wearing gloves even though it was 85 degrees out and they hadn't packed gloves when they'd left their home five states over to start this summer road trip vacation. A ski-mask poked out of her bejeweled fanny pack.

"Where were you?" Susan demanded.

"One of my net friends lives in the area, so when the movie ended and I didn't see you guys, I went to go visit her." Medea shrugged, her arms crossed over her chest. 

"And you borrowed her winter clothes?" Susan asked.

"Only to hold this. It's a present she made me. In glass-blowing class," Medea lied, pulling the shimmering flute from her fanny pack and holding it out. Susan and Harold would talk later of the dozens of tiny scratches up and down her arms below the elbows, as if their sweet daughter had climbed through a broken window and fallen onto the shattered glass. They would talk to each other, but never mention it to her. If she lied, they wouldn't like it. If she told the truth, they might not be able to handle it. 

10,980 B.C. 

The Matriarch shook. Her family piled more furs on her body, but nothing would keep the cold out for long.

"The flute," She reached out with a gnarled hand and her son gave it to her. A tune as old as memory flowed. So simple, yet the air vibrated, the bugs ceased their buzzing, the birds froze in their trees, and the wolves prowling the shadows around their fires laid on their backs exposing their bellies in submission. 

 Her final breath played a note that was flat.

2015 A.D.

The water ran red as it swirled down the hotel sink. She lathered soap onto her hands, all the way up to her elbows, for the third time. The dirt under her fingernails was stubborn.

 There was no legal way to dispose of the oligarch who ran the human-hunting island off the coast of Russia, so she'd pretended to a captured victim, then turned the tables on him and his friends. 

She limped back to her bed. 

Fifteen dead. She smiled at the bejeweled staff she'd stolen from his helicopter. He always took it with him for luck. It was full of ancient power from a primordial Russia, seething with taiga magic. Killing the oligarch had been nice, but getting the staff, handed down from the powerful to the more powerful for centuries, had been Medea's real aim. 

She opened the laptop she'd bought a few hours ago, installed her favorite VPNs and encryptors, and then took a risk by checking her e-mail. Stacks of letters from other agents smitten with her. Many messages from her mom. Medea hit reply, her fingers hovered over the keys, and then clenched in anger. Why did her mom waste her time like this? Didn't she know the world was at stake? That when you had this talent for battle and this brilliant brain that you belonged to the world, not to one family and its pretty concerns.

300,000 B.C.

The strangers shone like light dancing off of water. Their words were below, above, and on both sides all at once. The human family had come across them while gathering. 

They created scenes that were far away but in front of the tribesmen.

A sunbeam of red alone lit on a forest, before its thousands of trees erupted into flames. The lakes boiled. Craters yawned open as fangs launched from gray-unblinking snakes dangling from darkest night hawks whose wings did not flap to keep them aloft. It was absolute destruction.

The images made the humans sob. The Shimmering ones gifted a talisman to assuage their fear.

"We cannot stay, we cannot be involved, but on the day you see this omen," the shimmering ones brought a flute. Not carved wood like the flutes the family already had, but quartz crystal and something else, blinking vessels running beneath its surface. 

"Play this song. It will cause the hawks to fall."

They shared the song with the humans, and the humans tried to share it with them, until it was right. 

Then the shimmering ones left. 

2020 A.D.

Susan stepped backwards, and a large black robe unfurled, its chest embroidered with the logo of a prestigious university.

"Oh, we had to get this custom made, since you graduated with your BFA at 12." She ran her finger over the logo. "I argued with your dad so much to convince him to move to the city so you could attend college after you passed all the AP exams, but in the end he realized if we stayed put you'd just get into trouble from boredom."

"I'm in trouble now, Mom, the world is ending! Hurry it up!"

"Hurry, hurry, always such a hurry." Her mom set the robe aside, then pulled out a book. It was heavy and the binding was splitting from it being overstuffed. Inside where three massive rings and on those were sticky pages full of photos. She sat down on a moth-eaten arm chair shoved in the corner and began to flip through them by the light of her phone. "Sometimes its like I never had a daughter at all; you were gone so fast it was like I gave birth to a ghost."

 Medea threw down the set of dented pots and pans she had in her hands. They clattered as they bounced all over the floor. She stormed over to where her mother sat flipping through the photo album. 

"Stop wasting time!"

"Please come and sit with me. My dying wish, sweetie. Let's look at our few happy memories." Susan held the book up, like offering a treat. Medea's stomach dropped.

"Is the flute here?"

"I just wanted to spend the last few hours with you."

"Where is the flute?"

"There was this trend, a few years ago, of getting rid of everything that didn't bring you joy..." Susan recounted, smiling down at her memories. "And all of that magic stuff, it always got between us, and I hated it so much, so..." Susan reached out a shaking hand. "Please, hold me."

"You threw away the flute?" Her daughter would asked, if the world hadn't ended.