“The woman with a beard insists on returning,” so she has joined this series of experiments. This, experiment number two, has words contributed by Agnew T. Pickens, Rivkah Johnson, Monika Ashwin V, gary lundy, Aliona Zykova (aka aLioNKa), Verica Zivkovic, Chinedu Jonathan Ichu, Lynn Pries, Paul Dickinson, and Uwe W. Stroh. I have strung their lists and phrases out with my own surrealistic automatism-style writing. Community subconscious, collective unconscious, experimental writing series…

Please leave your comments and responses, like this post if you found it provocative reading, and share it with your friends and networks.

If you wish to have your words included in a future experiment, leave a list of five random words in a comment below. Thank you.

The Other Day

Road in Israel. Photo, ©2008 Michael Dickel

The woman with a beard insists on returning time and again to the past, resurrected on a credit card. Clouds, pink, grey tinge morning‘s eastern flowers, trees silhouetted with birds singing. The day’s chaperone opens the door and she strolls down to the creek. The screen slams shut while the computer cursor floats over the images, seeks links.

Never, she thinks. Never can she recall anytime worse or better. Yet each recollection collates her emotions into collections of missed chances, chance misses, all chance encounters, no path or purpose. My church window—most likely, glass from a bottle on an anvil—would branch paths predicated on doing nothing; I’m not an expert, she thinks. An expert and a green sweater would be just right in each case.

The polar night of memory courses along protons and electrons, north and south magnetic fields shaping the almond flower in soft moonlight. Stranded dresses turn up in the rock tumbler, polished like sheets of mica.

Almond flower in Jerusalem, photo ©2007 Michael Dickel

Sunrise, though, its scarlet monopoly on the world, takes backseat to no melody. Floating on the wings of maybe, the woman with the beard stretches arms toward the new day. Gamma floats between alpha and omega, gimel a game between aleph and tav. A single ray of sun hits the creek from under the blood-colored cloud of mourning nostalgia, false memory, flashing like bits of dream.

Love is the law now, physics mixed with mysticism and life a passing energy come to wake matter, stir it to potential beyond physicality. Memory dissipates, evaporates as the fog of dawn clears from her waking mind, a trinket that will traffic in trigonometry across a toad’s forest plaza.

Reflected blocked archway. Photo, ©2009 Michael Dickel

Menu for the series

Experimental Chaos  |  Experiment two—The Other Day  |  Experiment three—The Toad’s Garden  |  Experiment four—Reflexive Properties  |  Experiment five—Word-Tossed Salad  |  Experiment six—Deciduous Mirror Reflecting

”

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

“