Microfiction Monday – 202nd Edition
Matinee
by G.J. Williams
The film talked and the leading man died. The tinny note had been struck and there was no getting away from it. News came from all sides. The face was no longer enough. The narrowed gaze in close-up required a timbre of command. Our hero tried and tried, his voice a thin man’s question. He took up whisky: it didn’t help; and harsher brands of cigarette caused only coughing. Eyes, cheekbones, lips: what they’d always been. The mirror, like the camera, lied. He was face down, floor strewn with torn reel. There were no suspicious circumstances. There’d been no guests.
Optimal Delusions
At first he saw an octopus. A grey octopus slumbering under a white picket fence. But it turned out to be tree roots. Decades of secret squirming out of his neighbour’s backyard.
And those mottled whales breaching the surface of a sloping sea. Imperfections in the concrete retaining wall along the railway underpass.
Verdant islands of the South Pacific? Or clumps of moss in the rain drenched alley?
These little visual anomalies visited more frequently each day. Until the edges of certainty blurred and everything became like everything else. Just another possibility.
Downtown Park
by Tim Boiteau
He liked the square park downtown best.
A tree, a bench, yellow-smelling grass.
He liked to circle the cracked fountain where water used to shimmer in the sun. A retirement home placed across the street kept the bench restocked with an old man. A different one or the same one each day, he couldn’t say for sure, they looked so interchangeable to him: hoary-headed, bent, droop-skinned. Within each window a creamy-eyed and shrunken face glaucoma-gazed at his circumambulations.
At the square park downtown all eyes projected his spry, youthful ghost beside a spraying fountain that still shimmered in the sun.
Martha and George
Martha brings a martini to her lips to begin each day. A black wind howls past the tombstones inside George’s mouth when he speaks. Martha’s a woman who’d latch onto your crotch like a vise grip and tell you it’s a new way of gettin’ right with Jesus. You’d drop to your knees, beg to be saved. George pushes a grocery cart down an aisle of empty shelves to end each day. Broken eggshells in the dairy case. Martha likes to watch the rooster she keeps for a pet scratch for grubs in the dirt. The rooster’s also named George.
Treasures
by Matthew Shepherd
The shape of the face, the song-like quality of the voice, the calming scent. All had incrementally evaporated from Carter’s memory until only the small, unexpected trinkets of Sophie remained. The swirls on her silver heart earrings, the time an inappropriate laugh was stifled, the trio of freckles which blemished her forearm. Each became more precious with every passing day. Carter considered these traces to be the very essence of love: the unhealed scars left behind once happiness has gone. Treasures that even Sophie’s illness could not steal.
Microfiction Monday – 113th Edition
Charred Limbs
by Gage Banks
Decades of growth led to a beautiful forest blossoming along the clouds. Shrubbery, so vibrant yet calm. Footsteps among the wood are not heard but felt under the ground through thousands of sap-filled veins.
Elder trees speaking through the roots, telling tales of fallen friends. Some speak of men with spinning maws. Maws biting and ripping the flesh and bone of wooded kin, leaving a spray of arboreal viscera. Limbs split in twain, burnt to ash like old garbage
Minutes of pain, thrown to the ever-hungry flame. No stories to tell, only crackles of charred limbs torn from elder trees.
Ballerina
Sleek, cold bar under her right hand. Legs bent at an odd angle. The tips of her toes pointed to the floor. One breath of air, then two. The mirror reflected her face. Her tired smile. Thin, rosy cheeks. Hair in a tight bun, her fly-aways slicked back.
One breath, two. Her tutu felt soft on her hand. Her arm lifted over her head, her legs went down in a plie position. Her ankles cracked. She fell down the rabbit hole. Dust, that’s the only thing left of her now.
Raw
by Yash Seyedbagheri
I carry the eggs home.
When I open, rows of white ovals stare up at me. Except for two cracked open.
So much for a dozen.
There are ten eggs. I have to make them last a week. Along with the remnants of an onion, some sardines.
I pick up the fragments of shell as if I can put it all together again. Sweep away the temper, the reduced salaries, the subtraction. Fridges rife with expensive booze.
Now, the yolks glimmer, naked, unabashed.
I get a spoon. Take my first bite.
And another.
It’s a little cold. Raw. A beginning.
Vienna Sausages
by Tim Boiteau
After he doused her with the pot of boiling water, he fled from the screams, drove for hours, mind a white haze. Pulled over at a grocery store several states over and wandered the aisles. Filled up his cart with Vienna sausage tins. The sound of them clattering together soothed his nerves.
“I didn’t really.”
He paid, loaded all those cans into his car. Headed back home, picturing the broth sloshing over those pink tubes of boiled meat.
“Wasn’t real.”
Home.
His wife was gone.
Must’ve imagined it.
Her, too.
Except for the cold puddle on the floor.
The Owls Go Round
by LM Zaerr
Antibiotic ointment glistens on his bald head, but the gash won’t heal. “Mary? Did you feed the chickens?”
“I’m not Mary.”
He scritches a fingernail on the kitchen table and chips off another piece of varnish. The patch of raw wood grows. He rotates his coffee mug, gritting the remaining varnish. Ceramic owls glide round and round, winging me back, from granddaughter to sister. “Neighbor’s windmill squeals like a stuck pig. He won’t fix it. I’ll climb up in the night with a bucket of oil.”
The crack in his mind sends his past flooding over me, an unexpected blessing.
Hollow Inside
Waking to the nothingness, there is void outside the viewport and a deep space emptiness within us.
“Take me away from it all,” you said, desperate, and so here we are, on a one-way trip to the research station on Titan. Now you’re bored already, blame me for losing the social life you didn’t want, and dread the routine of the work to come.
We’re both carefully avoiding saying that we can’t see an endless future together, even as we head relentlessly towards it.
Desolate, I’m trying to decide which of us, if either, will survive the trip.
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