Contributors to this experiment (hover cursor over name to see their words): Michael Veloff, Jacqueline Dick, Cathy Crossan, gabriella garofalo, Jonathan Freed, Martina Reisz Newberry, Clare Washbrook, Paulette Buche, Aviva Frankel, MaryAnn Franta Moenck. Don’t forget to hover your mouse cursor above images and links to see more.
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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.
Deciduous mirror reflecting
The woman with a beard kneels to readjust the <a title=""Jun 5, 2013 – Emerging markets displace Europe as fulcrum of world risk … through railway stations of ‘Tier III’ cities that reduce Waterloo to Lilliputian size.”” href=”http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/10102008/Emerging-markets-displace-Europe-as-fulcrum-of-world-risk.html” target=”_blank”>Lilliputian fulcrum of the toad’s garden, reading between the lines of papyrus to the tune of an amphibious plop. The succinct, princely frog reflects in the deciduous mirror as it drops its leaves in a stellar reflection of night.
In 1968, the world revolted. Revolutionary fires return to this garden night, she reflects. Arterial blood flows through starlight as a feather drops and the ripples encompass the earth in chaotically flapping butterfly wings. Turkey. Greece. Japan.
The clematis bloom glows, a heavenly reminder of possibility in the face of probability, the white of snow turning blue. Time lights a candle in the spire of the flower as it writes caviardage: Be vast, matter, aye ye windmill, eye the coming winds of change. The garden waits. Time decides the status of weed or flower; hybrid history names epochs.
She robes herself against nakedness, the woman with a beard, standing there in the weather. Silk spreads softly, bringing with it its own fan of hyperbole. She smells the fecundity of toad, frog, garden, prince. Not aspartame-fake sweet, but a hieroglyphic packed with ritualized sacrifice, she thinks:
Her smooth-faced lover, cut out of her heart. The mad painter she erased, the crumbs brushed away. The stilted lover drifted away, followed the Dead. The tall one with the laser eyes, a space oddity, glazed over, lost to her world. The boy with the golden hair, driven out, away.
She throws rice grown in fish pits into the pond in the toad’s garden. The koi rise to the occasional flirting swallow twisting across a glimmering surface on a rolling basis, lapping pink from the sunset reflection. The toad thinks that pearls pester him, but not as much as they do the oyster.
She watches the water, then a tree girdled with carved lines from Gertrude Stein, sees a rose and thinks of the word love. What is it? A cheetah racing away or a crow cawing raucously to others? Not a stickler for such images, her property proves a magnet, her heart attracts ice, its melting memory a peripheral-vision flash as an icicle comes crashing down with a wallop.

She watches the water, then a tree
girdled with carved lines from Gertrude Stein,
sees a rose and thinks of the word love.
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
Categories: Experimental writing
fantastic stuff
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Thank you, Ampat.
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