Another new piece for Flash Fiction Month. Surrealistic pillow this isn’t, but it’s some sort of grief and memory exploration of the subconscious. Surrealism in the theme of a variation on a Beatles song. Woke up, got out of bed…wrote a flash fiction bit for your reading. As always, keep the comments coming.

A Day in the Life

Somewhere, he knows, a bed waits for him to drop into it.

The comb falls from his hand onto the counter by the sink.

This buy-and-sell life reflects in mirrors distorted by smoke, creates a dream that fills a cup with desire. The cup, therefore, remains empty.

The Knight of Cups, dragged upstairs from slumber near The Fool, turns the tables on us all.

What tabled dream, a comb pulled through hair in bed, smoke and mirrors, a cup dragged from the upper cabinet and taken upstairs—what dream un-debated, un-voted on, empties his will into an automaton of desire?

Somewhere a bed waits for him. He drops in it without seeing. It’s in the film, the one where they win the war.

When he wakes, the room has already filled with the heat of the day. He struggles out of bed from restless sleep, stumbles into the bathroom, combs his hair. Smoke drifts in his mind, clogging the memory of the dreams that make him so weary.

Downstairs he downs a cup of orange juice, then sips his cup of coffee while reading the paper. The news dragged on, making him long for his bed upstairs.

The film review reminded him of a book he’d read a long time ago.

——————

Upstairs, she woke beside the depression that he once filled. The room held more heat than his indentation.

She fell out of her side of the bed, rolled downstairs.

“Morning,” she mumbled.

“Off to work and what do you get? Another day older, deeper in debt.”

“Yeah. Another song, got the words all wrong,” she countered.

He slid a cup of coffee across the counter to her, kissed her cheek, and left.

She thought he looked familiar, when he kissed her cheek.

She showered, dressed, and sat at the table with a bowl of cereal, reading the paper. A car accident, fatal, apparently—the driver went through a red light. The photograph revealed his face from a few years ago. She’d seen his face before. Just before he went out the door.

The clock informed her she was running several days late, so she grabbed her hat and coat and ran for the bus.

That evening, she came home alone to her empty flat.

The dreams would swallow her again tonight. All those holes, so small, filling up nothing like as big as the Albert Hall.

The dreams would spit her out in the morning.

Maybe she should move to Blackburn, Lancashire.