Tag Archives: Flash-fiction

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If Only It Would Rain

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A Basil and Zoe story, sort of.

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Her head hurts.

And there’s this weird choking feeling in the back of her throat as if she stuffed grief whole into her mouth but can’t swallow it down where it won’t hurt anymore.

And the storm clouds are overhead, and thickening.

If only it would rain.

She goes through the motions… She meets friends for pedicures, but the colors seem overbright. She makes nice meals for herself, but the food all tastes like sand.

And the sky is black above her, no sun to be found.

Sundays are the worst.

Any other day, she could go up the street to see Sissy or Gina and share a frosted glass of iced tea on the porch or call across the fence to Becca and accept the invitation for a dip in her pool.

But Sundays are family days.

And her family is far away.

And her partner is further away than just “away,” because he’s dead, and she can’t quite wrap her brain around it.

But the sky keeps getting thicker and she can feel it in her brain pressing harder and harder.

She considers traveling, but she’s not ready to leave the house they built together, the things they so lovingly collected (trinkets from a myriad of planets) the bathtub he had installed just for her, because it echoed the one he’d installed in their cabin on the ship.

She considers going back to work, but she’s not ready to face auditions, and she’s spent enough time away that she no longer gets straight-up offers. Or at least, none that don’t repel her.

Her daughter tries to make her smile, asks her to play, demands beach days… and she does her best to be present in those moments, but inside all she feels is numbness, blackness, a void deeper than a black hole.

And the thunder is unceasing.

If only it would rain.

Nichelle / Uhura

Finding Antares (for Nichelle Nichols)

by

Nichelle / Uhura

 

The skies are green and glowing,
Where my heart is, where my heart is,
Where the scented lunar flower is blooming:
Somewhere, beyond the stars…
Beyond Antares.

 

To their sisters of the seas, the mermaids of Earth, and their air-breathing landbound human cousins, Antares is the biggest star in the constellation known as Scorpio. Some legends even refer to it as the scorpion’s heart.

It is also the place where the mother-heart of all space sirens beats. When they are created, they are bathed in Antares’s heat. When they love, they are blessed by Antares’ light. And when one of them ends her last dance with the spheres, they escort her home and bid her farewell as she begins a new journey, beyond time, beyond space… beyond Antares.

Astral mermaids are often seen as fictional creations, frivolous fantasy beings who hitch rides on the tails of comets, treat asteroid belts as steppingstones, and slingshot themselves off the rings of planets

They play on a field of immeasurable size, but they also love deeply and when they mourn, it is with reverence and respect, casting a green veil across the starlight with their tears. Sometimes, those tears are visible to mortals. We humans call them the aurora borealis.

Every so often, there is a mortal being inducted into the siren’s sisterhood. Our linear, finite lifetimes necessitate that this happens only when such a person has finished her last song. When that happens, the sirens come to guide her past their mother-heart to a place where time has no meaning.

Forever, as the song goes, is just another journey. Nichelle Nichols, beloved by so many of us here on Earth, is the latest mortal to be invited to take it with the sirens. We wish her well as she moves beyond Antares, surrounded by the love of her family, her friends, and her fans.

Then let the years go fading,
Where my heart is, where my heart is,
Where my love eternally is waiting
Somewhere, beyond the stars…
Beyond Antares.

 

Image Source: e online
“Beyond Antares” written by Wilbur Hatch (music) and Gene L. Coon (lyrics)
“Beyond Antares” performed by Nichelle Nichols

 

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4:33

by

The clock ticks. The countertop herb garden’s pump grinds: it needs more water. The owner of the house grunts slightly as she rises from the couch, which creaks in response. The faucet gushes into life and there is a soft click as the woman fills a plastic pitcher. The rubber cap of the herb garden pops loose. Water dribbles into the dark cistern. Water meeting water  – the splashes are muted by the container. A hiss: the grommet is sealed.

Ping. Pling. Plink. The faucet wasn’t turned off entirely. Drip by excruciatingly slow drip, water meets the metal of the sink basin.

The dog scratches himself, then shakes, ID and rabies tags jingling. He settles onto his bed with a soft flop. Slurping sounds emanate from it as he begins cleaning his privates.

The woman picks up her iPhone and texts a friend. The return sound is a whistle-ping. Ah, she’s using WhatsApp.

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She is still in the kitchen. She opens the fridge and it, too, emits a soft pop – louder than the herb garden. She stares into the chilly, white, landscape of possibilities. She slides open the deli drawer with a faint sound of metal on plastic, extracts cheese in crinkly plastic, and swings the door shut. A low click means it bounced open again.

A few seconds later, there is beeping from the fridge. The woman takes several seconds to recognize the sound, then bumps the door closed with her hip: a soft thud, followed by a more solid one.

Outside, thunder rumbles. The dog grumbles in response. The woman hushes him.

Another beeping sound begins but it’s external, a neighbor backing their golf cart out of the carport. (The vehicle’s headlights double the illumination in the woman’s house.) The cart whirrrrs into forward motion that fades away.

Birds sing in the trees outside. A sandhill crane calls to its lover. An owl screeches a warning to a squirrel. Lizards come out and make their soft gek-gek-gek sounds. Bug-zappers across the back yard at that neighbor’s place make their distinctive sting-pzzt sound as mosquitoes meet a sudden and violent end.

(No one mourns the mosquitoes.)

Somewhere in the distance, an ambulance siren is heard, the doppler effect obscuring the direction it’s coming from.

Thunder rumbles louder, and there is the electrical crack of a close lightning strike.

The dog whimpers – he hates storms – and the woman picks him up and rocks him like a human infant. His tags and her bangle bracelets click, clack, clank together.

The clock ticks.

Written last summer for Like the Prose 2021. Prompt # 24 – Crossover Art Form
Inspired by composer John Cage’s musical composition of the same name,
in which he simply let the audience listen to ambient noise for four minutes and thirty-three seconds.
artist: scaf_oner - https://www.instagram.com/scaf_oner/

Shadow

by

artist: scaf_oner - https://www.instagram.com/scaf_oner/“I have a little shadow
That goes in and out with me
And what could be the use of him
Is more than I can see.”

“He is very very like me
From his toes up to his head
And I see him jump before me
When I jump into my bed.”

The words of the old Robert Louis Stevenson poem circle through my head in my grandmother’s voice. She used to make me recite them at night… not just “My Shadow” but all those children’s’ verses. We would recite them with Grandpop, too, “to help keep his brain stimulated,” the old woman would say.

In my innocence I had no idea they were meant to be protective spells. I would just become entranced by the rhythms and rhymes and the time spent one-on-one with the old woman. The images would swirl around in my imagination, but I never paid attention to the meanings of the words.

I also had no idea that my grandfather was slowly slipping away from us as Alzheimer’s ate his brain. Some days, he couldn’t remember how the percolator worked. Other days, he couldn’t remember my name.

Then there was the night of the big storm. The power went out and the world felt deadly still without the usual electrical hum that most of us don’t notice til it’s gone.

I saw my grandfather downstairs, checking to make sure all the storm doors were shut, and the windows closed and latched. It struck me as a comforting scene until the lightning flashed outside and cast his shadow – his true shadow – on the wall near my bedroom door.

Looking down, I caught the old man staring at me the way I’d have stared at a chocolate ice cream cone with sprinkles from Carvel.

As if I wasn’t human.

As if I were FOOD.

And his shadow… it looked more like that creature from ALIEN than the old man who happily hunkered down on the floor and played trains with me just a few hours before. And it… it was looking at me, too, the way a predator analyzes its prey.

“Get to bed!” Grandma came out of nowhere to push me back into my room and slam the door shut. “You must never let Grandpop’s shadow touch you.” Unspoken was the other half of the admonition, the half I was still too young to hear: “and never let your shadow cover anyone else.”

Sitting in my bed, in the dark, I noticed that my grandmother’s shadow wasn’t with mine, that only my form showed in silhouette on the bedroom wall. Through the crack under the door, I saw flickering light and comprehension dawned. Her shadow was out there, defending me from my own grandfather’s inner demon.

“Recite,” she ordered, though there was affection beneath her commanding tone. “How do you like to go up in a swing?”

“Up in the air so blue,” I dutifully continued. “Oh, I do think it the pleasantest thing, ever a child could do.” The words calmed me. I imagined myself swinging away from the weird shadow battle to a place of peace and light.

When the storm ended and the power returned, Grandpop came to check on us. I checked the wall, and saw the lamplight throwing only the expected, human forms of all of us there. Grandma smiled at him, and said, “It’s alright now.”  And we all went on as if everything was the same as before.

Except… I am  different.

I know things now.

The shadow curse runs in my family – I learned that later – but it’s been steadily weakening from generation to generation.

And the rhymes? They protect us and repel the monsters.

If that seems a bit far-fetched, consider: “Ring Around the Rosie” defines the symptoms of the Plague, and “This Old Man” warns us about a pedophile. “Here We Go ‘Round the Mulberry Bush,” on the other hand,  refers to how female prisoners once got exercise.

My own demon shadow is a rare visitor, a puny and ineffectual thing compared to my grandfather’s.

Still, when the weather guy on tv warns of an impending storm, I sit on my daughter’s bed, take the video game out of her tiny hands, and teach her a rhyme:

“The funniest thing about him is the way he likes to grow—
Not at all like proper children, which is always very slow;
For he sometimes shoots up taller like an india-rubber ball,
And he sometimes gets so little that there’s none of him at all.”

None of him at all… Perhaps by the time my daughter has children, it will be so.

 

*All italicized verses by Robert Louis Stevenson
Art by  scaf_oner
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La Signora della Luna

by

CreativeFest

 

When I was little, my grandmother kept the moon in a glass on her bedside table. She kept her teeth in another glass right next to it.

girl-5760295_1280I always wondered what would happen if she mixed them up, and put the moon in with the fizzy tablet that cleaned her teeth. Would it wipe away all the craters? Chase away the mares and level the Archimedes mountains?

But she never mixed the glasses.

I asked her once, why she trapped the moon that way. She told me that after my grandfather left this world, she was lonely. During the day, she had friends and neighbors to visit with, and family to talk to on the phone. But in the deep, darkness after bedtime, she missed having someone right there, with their head on the pillow next to hers, to share her thoughts with.

“But don’t people miss the moon, when you have it in the glass?” I’d asked.

“Oh, no,” she said. “Because the moon isn’t just the moon;  it’s the quiet listener we all need from time to time. I have the moon in this glass, and we talk, and then the moon goes to the next person who needs it, and I drink the moon-water.”  She paused and smiled at me, and her teeth were shiny in her mouth, in a way they never were in the glass. “The moon-water is what makes it possible. Your grandfather used to snatch the moon from the sky when we was away at war, and keep it in his canteen.”

“He didn’t!”

“He did. He sent me a drawing of it, once. I think it’s in the bottom drawer of my bureau.”

I went to the bottom drawer, the one where my grandmother kept her treasures and found the manila envelope of my grandfather’s drawings. We never found the picture of the moon in his canteen, but we flipped through pages showing the anatomy of flowers and insects in textbook detail, and a sketch he drew of my grandmother when they were young and newly married. He’d written La Signora della Luna in the top margin. It meant “Lady of the Moon.”

“Would the moon listen to me, if I needed to?”

“Maybe.” My grandmother rarely gave definitive answers. “If the mood was right and you asked politely.”

Of course, I resolved to ask.

I tried and tried – constantly that summer, and less frequently as the years turned and I grew older. In time, I forgot all about the moon being in my grandmother’s water-glass, and when I did remember, I assumed it was a trick of the light, a reflection shining through her window.

But after she left this world to go be with my grandfather again, I found the thick, heavy glass in a box of things to be donated, and I asked my mother if I could have it.

“I guess so,” she said, puzzlement in her voice. “But it’s just one glass. We were never sure, but we think she took it from the Officer’s Club dining room.”

That didn’t surprise me. My grandmother had many mysterious acquisitions among her belongings: a tiny milk pitcher from a favorite bed and breakfast, one purple satin shoe, a pair of gold bracelets that didn’t seem big enough for even her tiny wrists, yet somehow, magically, she managed to wear. A stray glass was nothing by comparison.

Except that I knew the secret.

Alone at home, a year and a day after the funeral, I filled that glass with water and put it on my bedside table. I wasn’t even thinking about a possible lunar visitation. I just remembered that it had been hers.

That night, I dreamed of my grandmother, not the way she’d been in the last years before her death, but vibrant and relatively young the way she’d been when I was little. Her cheeks were barely lined then, and her eyes were bright and shining. She didn’t speak to me, but I felt the edge of the bed dip when she sat down, and I smiled at the touch of her cool fingers on my forehead.

I woke up to dim light, certain that I could detect her rose-scented perfume in my room. Reaching for the water glass on my table, I froze. Because instead of just water, the moon was there, just floating as if it belonged there instead of the sky.

Moon-water doesn’t taste any different from plain old drinking water,  I discovered later. But drinking it makes you feel lighter inside. It’s as if gravity isn’t pulling on you quite as hard as it should.

And the moon… well, it’s an excellent listener. It never talks back, of course, but the next morning I always wake up with an answer to whatever problem I had told it about.

I bet if I had a lover who could draw, instead of one who played music, he’d call me the Lady of the Moon, now, and I guess that’s how it should be. I don’t have a granddaughter to pass my legacy to, but one of my nieces has the soul of a dreamer. Maybe I’ll ask her what she sees in the glass, next time she spends the night.

My grandmother used to keep the moon in a glass of water on her bedside table. Now it’s my turn.

#Written for the October 2021 #Creativefest. Prompt: Moon. 

Menage a Trois

Menage a Trois

by

Menage a Trois

I found her waiting for me at the table when I got there. I hung up my coat and had, and went to join her. “Oh, it’s good to see you…” I half-whispered. But she didn’t answer.

She was wearing a green dress that flattered her curves in all the right ways, and I couldn’t stop staring at her. She glowed, especially around her neck where a maroon choker rested, right around the hollow of her throat.

I reached out to touch her, but I could tell she was too cold. Better to wait, better to let her get warmed up, better to give her a chance to breathe.

And for me to breathe her in. Her scent, intoxicating. Her hair, like the softly burning embers as a fire is nearly out. Her curves…

I shook my head to clear it. This wasn’t an affair, and she didn’t need foreplay.

I reached out and stroked my fingers down her neck, her side. So smooth. I did it again, felt the change from her silky green to the colorful fabric wrapped around her middle. I couldn’t help it, I moaned.

I’m not sure if I would have touched my lips to her neck or not, but even though I knew she was receptive to the idea, I didn’t try it.

In all honesty, I didn’t have a chance.

Bright lights came on and pulled me out of my reverie, and the voice – the voice I hear every morning and fell asleep with every night, spoke to me in sweet tones.

“Is there some reason you’re in the dark? Oh, hey, have you tried the new pinot noir yet? I got it for eight bucks at Costco. I’ve heard it’s really good.”

I sighed. I love my wife, but sometimes you just want to enjoy a glass of wine alone, or at least, enjoy a quiet fantasy.  Maybe next time.

“Shall I pour for both of us?” I called to the other woman in my life.

“Please!”

I looked back at the one in the green number. “I guess it’s three of us tonight.”

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Doing the Right Thing (a Basil and Zoe story)

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“Why does doing the right thing never feel good?”

“I do not understand.” Basil’s voice was mild as always.

“Well, take us for example. We’ve been dating since I was seventeen, but until I was eighteen, we never went farther than kissing. Seventeen is legal throughout the Coalition of Aligned Worlds, so why did we wait? It made me antsy and worried you didn’t feel as much as I did. We waited because we were concerned your reputation would be…”

“… besmirched?” Basil interrupted, his tone amused.

“Yes, thank you.” I took a breath. “But it turned out no one cared. So why did we do it?”

“We did what we felt was right at the time,” he reminded me gently. “And we went farther than kissing, Zoe.”

“Well, yes… if you want to be technical.”

“I am technical,” he reminded me. It was an old joke, and one that he’d never cease making. “And you are using the fact that we did not ‘jump into bed’ as a deflection for your true concern. I cannot help you work through it if you do not tell me what it is.”

“See, you’re doing the right thing, and it doesn’t feel good.” I paused for a beat. “Well, it doesn’t feel good for me right now.”

“You are still deflecting.”

“Must you always be right?” I grumbled.

“Yes, even when being so doesn’t ‘feel good.'”

“Brat.”

“Sometimes,” he agreed. “But you have yet to tell me what is troubling you. Dearest, whatever it is, it cannot be ‘that bad.'”

I paced back and forth in front of his console for a few minutes. Then I stopped, and said, “It’s the Kazoines.”

Basil’s last mission – the ship’s last mission – had been an attempt to relocate a colony of twenty-thousand people. The Kazoine sun was failing, and the Stellar Navy had been sent to rehome the colonists. Except they refused. Well, some of them. Some had come aboard the Cousteau and a few of the other ships in the fleet, but not enough.

“You believe we should have enacted a forced evacuation, pulling people from their homes, even though they understood the danger of remaining on Kazo Prime.”  Basil wasn’t asking. He knew how I felt. He knew a good number of the officers and crew felt the same.

“Yes.”

“But you know that those who chose to stay were honoring their faith, and their commitment to the homes they built on their planet. And you also know that the vast majority of those who remained behind were disproportionately aged and infirm. The rigors of space travel and resettlement may well have caused as much harm as staying on a planet that was losing its sun.”

“I know,” I said. “I know it was an informed choice. I know they would likely not have survived planting a new colony and all the work that entails. I know that even now the Kazoines who did come with us are complaining about lack of space and creature comforts.”

“Do you believe living on the Cousteau is a hardship?” Basil changed the subject, but I knew we’d go back to my issue.

“Well, no, but I share private quarters with you. And this is home to me now. The colonists have been ripped from their homes and are basically living in dorms.”

“That is true, but it will only be for two weeks, and they are aware the situation is temporary.”

“I still feel awful about it all,” I said. “But especially that we left those people to die.”

“It is alright to feel that way,” Basil assured me. “We had little choice in this mission because Coalition regulations do not permit us to supersede local authorities unless criminal acts are being committed. I, too, regret the loss of life and separation of families that will and has happened as a result. But we did rescue seventeen thousand people who will continue to live fruitful lives.”

“And you believe those seventeen thousand negate the three thousand who stayed?”

“Not at all, Zoe. But saving those who were willing to come was the right thing to do.”

“I know,” I said, collapsing onto the couch. “I know. But it still feels pretty awful. Why does doing the right thing always suck so much?”

“It does not,” Basil said, “always.”

And I had to accept that.

Written for Brief #23 of Like the Prose 2021:  First line prompt.

 

 

 

 

 

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Prose and Cons

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We’re supposed to be writing about con artists but I have no CONfidence that I can pull it off.

May I CONfide in you? The only con artists floating around in my CONsciousness are the characters in “Guys and Dolls,”  and that movie Leonardo DiCaprio did about the guy who CONvinced people he was a pilot for PanAm , among other things. It was a true story. I think it became a musical due to some strange CONfluence of events. Funny, I can remember if he was ever  CONvicted. Not Leo. The real guy.

After some CONtemplation I’ve determined that Will Smith’s character in “Six Degrees of Separation” could be CONsidered a con artist. Oh! And Wimpy from the old Popeye cartoons! I’m CONfident that he never paid anyone Tuesday for the hamburgers he was CONstantly eating.

(There was a hamburger stand called Wimpy’s across the street from my high school. CONtrary to rumors, there were no human body parts in the meat. And the French fries there were always hot and crispy. They served them in paper cones, like at the boardwalk.)

But that’s the sum-total of my less-than-CONsiderable knowledge about con artists and why I’m the worst person ever CONscripted to write about one.

If you’ve read this much of my CONvoluted tale, you will now be slightly CONsternated.

Why? Because I’ve used my CONniving ways to CONvince you that I’ve written a story about con artists.

And thus CONcludes my CONcept piece.

Written for Brief #22 of Like the Prose 2021: Con Artists

Dreamer

Five More Minutes

by

Dreamer

“Five more minutes,” I demanded, and the Faceless Man nodded. “It’ll cost ya,” his voice came from nowhere. And everywhere.

“How much?”

“Ten seconds of attention.”

Attention was one of the highest currencies. If the time was taken from your account at the wrong moment, you might blink and miss an ID scan or turn your head and get clipped by a teenager taking the family flitter out for a spin.

“That’s a lot.”

“You know my prices rise every time you come to me for more.”

I couldn’t help it. Like everyone else in the Belt I was tired, hungry, and chilly all the time, even though I had a cushy office job and wasn’t actually running the water makers or mining ore.

“I know.”

“Maybe you should buy five degrees of heat instead. It’ll only cost you two breaths and being warm might alleviate your other… problem.”

Tempting. It was tempting. But I needed the dream-time with my  lover out on patrol duty beyond the Rim more than I needed to be warm.

“I’ll pay your price,” I said. “Five full minutes.”

“Have I ever stiffed you?”

“No. No, you haven’t.”

“Alright then. Your hand?”

I put my hand in the cold machine and felt the prick of the needles. Two of them. One to give me what I wanted and one to fulfill my payment.  “Thank you.”

I pushed the com-set away and rolled over in bed. Five more minutes of sleep and happy dreams.

I never noticed that the elevator car wasn’t there when the doors opened.

I never knew that’s how the Faceless were created.

The next time I used a com-set, I’d be the one with all the time in the world.

Written for Brief #21 of Like the Prose 2021: Fantasy

Boat trip

Where the River Meets the Sea

by

Boat at Night

They knew weather conditions in the gulf were unstable, but her grandfather checked the maps and figured they were far enough south to avoid the brunt of any storms. So, they went to the dockside cafe and stocked up on fruit and sandwiches and bottled water, and  they took the boat out anyway.

Motoring down the Anclote River to St. Joseph’s sound they made up stories about the Original Occupants (that’s what he called native Americans) and their guardianship of the freshwater springs that dotted the coast.

“Sweet water,” she mused. “It doesn’t make you young but keeps you alive. Maybe we got the Fountain story all wrong.”

“How so?” His voice seemed craggier than usual.

“What if it wasn’t the fountain of youth? What if it was the fountain of life?”

“You might have something there,” her grandfather agreed. “Maybe you could make a story about it.”

He always said it that way.  Make a story. Not write one. And why not? Storytelling was as much construction as imagination after all.

“Maybe I could,” she agreed.

They kept the engine going until they were out past Anclote Key and into the Gulf of Mexico. Then they hoisted the sail and switched to wind power until they’d reached the secret beach.

They anchored the boat in shallow water and half-swam / half waded to shore, floating their cooler between them.

They picnicked under a palm tree and then she swam while her grandfather napped. It used to be that he would fish during these excursions and bring home the catch for her grandmother to clean and cook. But Grandma had left them several months before and it wasn’t the right time of year for grouper, anyway.

Before dusk, they returned to the boat, turning on the lights so they’d be visible. Again, they stuck to wind power on the gulf, heading home with her at the wheel.

Just outside the mouth of the river, her grandfather said, “It’s time.”

“Oh, Grandpa!”

The old man pulled a black plastic box out of a storage chest and leaned over the gunwale of the boat. He opened the lid and poured the gray-white contents into the water.

“Your grandmother and I met at a solstice celebration,” her grandfather said. “She made me promise to say goodbye to her on the first one after her death.”

He looked down into the water. “Swim with the dolphins, my love. I miss you.”

There were no words she could have uttered so she merely slung her arm across the old man’s shoulders and kissed his stubbly cheek. He smelled of tar and salt and peppermint, and there were times she wanted to wrap that scent around her like a blanket.

The motored back to the harbor in silence, tied the boat, and made to leave.

“You go home, honey,” her grandfather said. “I’ll bunk down below tonight.”

Reluctantly, she left him. But somehow, she knew that next summer solstice, her grandparents would be reunited.

Written for Brief #20 of Like the Prose 2021: Solstice