Today—flash (?)

By Michael Dickel on Friday, 3 May, 2013 • ( 11 Comments )

Dan Wicket has posted on FaceBook that May is Short Story month. The Emerging Writers Network is onboard, not surprising as that’s Dan’s project, too. I saw that the Pen/Faulkner Foundation also posted something about it, a cartoon. So, here goes my second post in something maybe like fiction. Or not. I don’t know quite what this is, I think flash (fiction? experimental writing?). I think that I might continue with more of this during May. There’s a thought. Let’s see how far this goes during this merry, merry month of May. Comments, thoughts, suggestions welcome.

Today

Boots glitter down rain drenched paths, sheep trails really. Clouds scream past jets standing at attention over the melted glass sea. The woman with the beard met her smooth-faced lover at a bar over the hills and past two towns. Refracted drops of rain dripping off the grasses. Tired flights of birds shiver trees, as the drowsy film skips its sprockets in the middle of the romantic scene.

She mounts the cliffs. His galleon sailed, sank, salted away in a bank account she has no number or password for. The water whines, dark red shadows swirling. He bought her whiskey, smoked her hair with cigarettes. Carried off by nomads. The beating drums. Her mind mixed into music rocking down the stoney way.

What washing machines cook on the gas range, casts iron out of the pans. Emergent molecules develop atomic movies, entertaining faster than the light particles with popcorn imitations. Mystics could not imagine the empty vessels of cyborg social network terror cells recombining synthetic DNA along the runway. It’s another dream, a box of rain sung to the strum of guitars. She missed the turn at the car speedway, Mother’s Day 1973, Des Moines, Iowa, and spun out into orbit around glimmering promises. Before.

The photographer jacketed the digital sleeve surrounding still moments. Necrophilia began with still cameras, expanded with movies and talkies and quickies. Entropy sways the glyphs along silver screens, our lives screened by so many lookers gazing at nothing.

So she took the smooth-faced lover home. Why not? And it wasn’t so bad, not really. Warm bears in bed, unstuffed and compliant to desires not his or her own. Winter hibernation arrives without warning. The coals burn low; by itself, an ember goes out. Spring cubs run around the melting snow. That was all so long ago.

He doesn’t stand under the waterfalls. Trees paint shadows. She sang sad songs by the shore in a minor. Key. He countered with his note on the piano—C#. Falling into sevenths, an odd fraction to uncover a piece of the pie.

Despite everything, she goes off to work.