Some Flash Fiction
A few newly-written, extra-short "stories."
Reading and writing about Russell Edson last week sparked some flash fiction of my own. As with my “Word Doodles,” I tried to not worry too much about “making sense,” and just let each word inform the next and take me someplace unexpected.
The Night Without Walls
The rectangle of light reflecting off the screen of his phone onto the sad peeling wall paper sends the cat hunting, every muscle alert, crouching, stalking, looking high up the wall where he moves the reflection of the midday sun by tilting the phone slightly, watching the cat carefully, trying to guess when she will give in and leap toward the thing she will never catch.
This is when he remembers the way her hair fell from her white, woolen hat, and the white falling snow left no mark there, and her colorless eyes in the parking lot light held him so firmly in place before she turned and left, moving further and further out of reach, a shimmering thing in the parking lot light, snow coming harder and harder, each flake sending untold reflections out into the night without walls.
Current Turn
When the currents turn and bend inward, the calculations will be complete, and the curious legions of space that constitute the forever-lonely center of the self will grasp the edges of morning time, come again like a rodeo clown over the near-enough cliff edge. That’s the moment, the ever-listening pulse—in between this darkening, another entreaty. It is the pure, fledgling son of winter who listens for something new in the falling light of a February evening. This far from shore, the swells are more even, rolling even, each wave-trough another moment of certainty, of longing, each peak an unveiling, when the currents turn.
The Other Side of Things
The pressure now of another heartbeat rings deeply across the just-dark, wind-swept evening. If he listens well enough, he can hear the broken pulses of basement machines set against the high tenor of the sound always there in his ears. If he has eaten something sweet, its remnants will linger against the inner crevices of his teeth, where he can decide to still taste that gone-thing if he so chooses.
Across the way, a woman wonders if tomorrow might shield her from all this noise. She sits in the yellow light of a nearly-gone-now, melted-away-again-just-like-the-last-one candle, shaped at one point in time like a magnificent, breeching whale, one whose utterances carry for miles unheard by anyone on the other side of things.
White Wings
Especially now when light becomes a calling gull and the surf upends itself again, he looks to his child silhouetted against mist and ocean and this blue-blue September.
The sand, cold and coarse, accommodates itself to the weight of him, and whispering engines trickle down the far away veins of highways that etch again the edges of mountains, falling again to this brink that is the shoreline.
Before long, the child grows sunward, taller than a cloud, beyond the reach of his withering arms, too slippery and fast to hold onto.
Come nightfall, he is alone again like long ago when the ocean was too vast and impossible to consider. The gulls have fallen and tucked their heads neatly under folded white wings, ears pressed into feathers.
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Love these meanderings…