Glasgow cross- Flash fiction story

By Moss Taylor

There once was a young boy who wanted to see everything, and time granted his wish. He was designed and built by people long since gone - but he remembers. He knows the men with calloused hands and sweaty brows who pulled him together, stone by stone. Fishermen and Mason’s and Merchants. 

They called him Mercat Cross, because of the bustling market in front of him. People always change - they run, like water, this way and that, tracked only by the hands on his face - but he stays the same, always the same, whether he is upright or crumbling. He stays the same, and he remembers. 

He remembers the crowded market stalls, gone as soon as they came, replaced with trucks and lorries, selling jams and marmalade, cheese and oats. The vehicles rushed towards him in the morning and belched away in the evening. 

People were exceptionally fond of this symmetry - rushing and rushing and rushing, only resting in the dark, and building still in their dreams. Just when he thought they couldn't rebuild, restore and revise anymore, they found a way. There was reason, of course, to this chaos. There were patterns. A young woman wrapping her child in a tartan shawl. Soldiers raising glasses at the pub outside. Children taking blue tram cars to the botanical gardens. He watches, and he remembers.

Even later, when they rushed westward, building higher into the skyline and deeper into the ground, and the space around him became last crowded, even today, he stands, speaking a language all but forgotten. “Whit's fur ye'll no go past ye.”
Time had said to him, and he nodded, in a movement that took a millennium.