This is my sixth post in a series of something maybe like flash fiction. This is new work for me. As this work has been flying off my keyboard each day, your comments, thoughts, questions, ideas all are welcome. May is Short Story month. These are short, and maybe they’re stories. This post doesn’t have artwork—I didn’t have time with a busy few days here and coming up. Perhaps next week I will add some artwork. I did put in lots of links, some wiki, some wicked fun. Check them out for extra added dimensions. Or not. I’ve now named the series “Chicken and Egg,” and think this is the final installment. Or for now. New series coming next. 

Please leave your response before you go. I very much want to learn how people who read these respond—from a word or three to an analytical critique, all comment welcome. Thank you.

Yesterday

Waking wired, wound ‘round spools spinning space and time into brief episodic memories, dream–drips not quite joining into a garden reflecting pool gardenia mirror. The woman with a beard rises warily, sensing her smooth-faced lover’s scent; a single-point singularity draws every line to its perspective; all thoughts crush under their own weight, absolute zero, frozen atoms collapsing around her.

Nomads drift across galaxies. Emotional vampires—vapid, pale—float above every wound. Still seized by decades flown past a million miles of space journey or more ago, she shakes graying hair loose from sleep, finger combing combustible comprehension into something smooth.

Way down below the ocean, down deep under the sea, death drifts. The shadow of warships do not reach its lair. She reaches out her mermaid hands to feel the bone rubbed smooth by all who have drunk the brine. Once she flew high and wild, wildly searching, quests without questions, travel without destination. Now she sinks or swims, deep into or out of dream.

Morning glorious, photo digitally modified with Adobe PhotoShop
from The World Behind It, Chaos, ©2009 Michael Dickel (click to go to book)

On the commune she worked the vegetables, hand-hoeing weeds, no top in the turbid heat caressing her. They played Frisbee totally naked in the grass, slowing sluggish traffic on the county road, attracting road workers who ate their lunch as close as they dared, while community members danced in dizzy drizzle from sprinkler heads. Honeybees buzzed the air around flowers and forested hills, their boxed super hives out back.

Before the harvest, the others drifted into bars, back to cities, out of the community. Her then lover, who called herself the mad painter, took off with the dumpy man who brought eggs every morning. His wife wept tears of joy to be free of his philandering pheromones. The woman with the beard bought chickens from her, raised a rickety henhouse, and no longer needed egg deliveries, although longing.

She stretches up into this morning, mourning all past particles as she touches the smooth-faced lover still asleep, wanting him up and out of her bed. His groans grumble, resonant entropy waking to momentum. His will does not wake.

Tomorrow. Or the next day. He will write a note. Off-key. He will leave it on the piano. He will leave.

See how sharp the resonant echoes play. Jazz dissonance.

Breaking fast or slow, eating now or later, piecing it all together, her real eyes contracting into realization: she wants him to go. She has been waiting.

She thinks about buying some hens.

The series, Chicken and Egg, has six installments for now, in this order:

Tomorrow | Today | Morning | Afternoon | Evening | Yesterday

“

You can read these stories
and other Flash Fiction by Michael Dickel
in The Palm Reading after the Toad’s Garden

“