Little Miracles

This is the first story I submitted in last year’s NYC Midnight Flash Fiction Contest. The Contest is fun and challenging. You’re given a setting, item and a genre for a 1000-word story. Then a panel reads your story and you get points and if you get enough you go onto the next round. I did make it pretty far in 2024’s contest. I am participating in this year’s contest as well. Anyway, here’s the first story I wrote last year with some changes suggested by the judges. It’s now a little longer than 1000 words.

Synopsis: Home Care Nurse Sabrina Hale chases down a delusional patient who is a retired nuclear engineer bent on blowing up the waste storage facility at a dormant nuclear power plant. Greek gods are to blame according to the patient.

For Sabrina Hale, getting kicked down a flight of stairs into an old man’s dark basement was the last straw and, the reason,  why she was riding a stolen motorcycle to a nuclear power plant.

Sabrina was a home care nurse and the old man was Mike Botts, her pain-in-the-ass patient. Three nurses had quit the service and field because of him. So Asclepius Care Co. dumped Botts on Sabrina because she was “dependable,” according to her boss.

“Dependable,” Sabrina  thought as the white lines on the highway blurred into a single stripe, that’s what everyone called her. But what her boyfriends, teachers, parents, bosses all meant was she’s a “sucker.” She was done with that and she was going to make  sure the first person that learned that would be Mike Botts..

She knew he’d be at the Dogwood Cliffs Nuclear Power Plant. Botts had worked there and it was one of his obsessions. He even had blueprints of the facility in his house. He talked about the plant in a hushed reverent tone, like it was one of the great cathedrals of the Earth. His only other interest was in Greek Myths. He could be ornery and sarcastic, but hadn’t exhibited any of the meanness other nurses had reported in his file. In fact, Sabrina, had actually felt guilty about liking being at Botts home because it meant she didn’t have to listen to Ralph, her boyfriend tell her how she wasn’t earning enough money with her nursing degree, or how she was getting fat and how she was a bad driver. Sitting there thinking she needed him, afraid to confront him… Even when he got rid of her dog. She hadn’t said anything. She loved the dog!

She was never brave enough. It’s what her parents told her when she decided to become a nurse, that she was too weak. Nurses were heroes. They never understood that’s why she wanted to be a nurse. She wanted to save people. She thought she could do it, once she made it through the program. But it hadn’t gone as she expected. 

Then she got Botts, who had been a picnic compared to Ralph, up until the moment he tried to kill her. Why had he tried to do that? He thought she was weak too. What had she missed about him?

He did sometimes mutter to himself as if talking to a person pacing in front of him and he had that weird thing about his shoes needing to be tight. Sabrina had to retie the old man’s shoes at least twice a week. That’s how got her. She knelt down to tie his shoes, didn’t notice he had the basement door open and then, “pow” down the stairs she went. She woke up later in the dark, got out through a tight window — too fat, my ass! And then found the motorcycle in the garage.

Botts, was not thinking of the young woman he had kicked down his stairs into the dark. No, he was pretty pleased with himself, humming the tune to Blessed Assurance as he pulled up to the power plant gate. That gate brought him back. He was shocked by the tune creeping into his head. He had abandoned that God a long time ago. It was a blessing letting go of the religion his parents. He had at last found in the twilight of his life, the little Miracles. They made everything and were in everything. They contained more power than all those vain Olympians. Zeus and his family, they were trouble. It was the Little Miracles, swirling in their golden mist, who told him the Olympians still thwarted men’s dreams — men like his father. They even used little Mike as a child to destroy his father’s dreams.

“It wasn’t my fault,” Botts said to the Miracles. “Dad couldn’t see it. The gods kept untying my shoes, making us late. Stopping us from finding the uranium claims. They made him mad. They, they made him drink…”

The gods and their agents were ubiquitous. The reminded him of that nurse — a servant of Hades. He smiled at having sent her to Tartarus and using her car to deliver his bomb to free the Little Miracles from Phobus.

Phobus, god of fear, was the worst. Phobus was going to ship the miracles from Dogwood to Hades unless stopped.

Botts pulled up to the power plant guard house.

“Appointment?” the guard asked looking doubtfully at the tall old man crammed into the Honda’s front seat.

“Inspection,” Botts snapped, flashing a fake ID. The gold swirled in front of his eyes revealing the guard as an undulating, mass of larval rings with a snake tail that acted as an arm and hand. The guard pointed to the red Waste Storage Building. 

“We’ll meet you there.”

Botts drove to the building and got out. He looked up at the two large cooling towers flanking the main reactor building’s containment dome. He had worked here to help light the world. Now dormant, the last bits of that miraculous work was called waste and locked away.

A man in a golf cart sped across the empty parking lot arriving as Botts started to open the trunk.

“There’s no inspection on the schedule,” the man complained getting out as the guard joined them. 

“Spot inspections are part of the decommissioning process,” Botts said. The Miracles swirled in front of his face. “Phobus, himself.”

“What?” the man asked.

“Nothing.” He opened the trunk to reveal his bomb — sticks of dynamite wrapped in black cord, the timer running.

“Are you crazy?” Phobus exclaimed.

The security guard drew his gun. 

“I am not — and unless you know something about arc-fault circuit interrupters and can defuse this bomb I’d holster that gun,” Mike said. 

No one moved for a moment but then, Mikee heard thunder. He looked up, but saw nothing.

“Now what?!” Phobus said 

No, it couldn’t be.The Nurse had escaped tartarus. But it was’t the nurse — Athena! She was coming, cloaked in her father’s wrath and in his sound.

Having found no one at the gate, Sabrina rode through it. She saw Mike with two men looking into the trunk of her car and launched herself across the parking lot on the thundering Harley..

“I’m out of here,” the guard said, dropping his gun.

He tumbled away quickly for a pulsing larva, Mike thought. “You should run, too” Mike said to Phobus.

“I can’t do that.”

“Shame,” Mike said lifting the bomb out of the trunk as Sabrina arrived.

“You’re too late,” he told her.

Sabrina got off the bike and promptly fell to the ground — her bruised and cramped legs wouldn’t work right away after that ride. She had meant to hop off and tell the old bugger off and that she was quitting How embarrassing. But lying there, she realized what Mike was holding. 

“Shit,” she said.

Mike stood there cradling his bomb. He her calmly locked eyes with her before he scoffed, “Just surrender. You can’t stop this. Look at you. This world is beyond you. You can’t do anything.”

Sabrina felt the hot asphalt under her body. She felt it on her cheek.Maybe he’s right… What can I do? I’m just… “No. I’m not just nothing. I’m a nurse dammit. I… and then she had an idea. 

“Mike, your shoe’s untied.”

Mike looked down. He heard his father’s ghost, “Why can’t you keep your shoes tied, you little idiot… You’re why we never find anything.”

Mike put the bomb back in the trunk and bent down to tie his shoe. 

Sabrina yelled. “Get him!”

The plant manager sprang onto Mike. Sabrina scrambled to the trunk. Mike was much bigger but older than the plant manager. It could go either way. Sabrina saw the bomb and gulped. She slammed the trunk, pulled the keys from it and ran to get in. Mike swiped at her but missed. She jumped in and peeled out.The river she thought. It was just beyond the fence. She built up speed then took her foot off the gas and at the last minute bailed out tumbling along the pavement. The car hit the fence and got stuck, hanging off the side of the cliff over the river. 

Sabrina swore and started to crawl away when the concussive force hit her followed by the blast’s sound.

But she survived. She was on her back and looked up. Clouds floated through a mix of blue and black sky hangin over the looming structures of Dogwood Cliffs as dusk fell. She sat up. The plant manager had won the fight with Mike and was holding him down. In the distance police sirens indicated this was all over. 

She stood up looking at her burning car, hearing her sobbing patient awaiting arrest and she thought her life was really going to change at last —what a little miracle.