Tag: Flash Fiction

Flash Fiction Piece – “What Use is Belittlement?” – 3/1/2023

I keep grieving on that last word, hoping that meteors will reverse themselves. Or that an eclipse will bring back its former light. Or that a tidal wave would not have crashed to topple a tower – that tower, the one where we were unified. Being held upright, because there was a desire to be as close as possible to stars. Instead, eyes were brought down, falling to pathways called scars. Burying everything inside, finding futility in everlasting joy. All familiarity upended itself upon everything somehow destined to keep going – if only to hear a heart at that last word, matching it with a final heartbeat.

Who heard us? Screams were whispers. Traded answers were given more questions, as those once-endeared had been deserted upon oceans that never teemed with life. Closure was merciful, or it merely cleaned off a written page I should have taken to, to relieve you, to let you go from these dirtying arms. I was responsible for all, to relieve that which confined you. I brought you up, for though we were unified at that tower, I was that tower.

My legs, here being crippled, are kneeling to this result, this emptiness. For what are stars but a white, blank page; and what is darkness of space besides another bewildering absence?

Lasting until a morning burned itself on our foreheads, and I refused to let you know. I refused to let you go, while you had already closed your eyes. You were deaf to feeling, while I was blind to what you were hearing. You were hearing another call, while I clung onto a single word that you ignored. Perhaps purposefully? It might be with purpose, as all you held onto was another word I could not tell had always been your truer fulfillment.

Flash Fiction Piece – “Everything to Her Obliviousness” – 2/27/2023

I re-envisioned someone in a different state. A new world. Another pathway. She drew herself back into collapse, as all things, all memories would fade in her shadow. I drew her in, I carried her home. Many times, I brought her into open arms. Would they close? Would they ever truly close? I embraced an icicle. It wouldn’t melt, as arms were nothing but that which she confirmed as only to her familiarity. To her, arms would leave. To her, arms would dissipate, like fog before sunlight rises. It had been for sunlight to also leave. For fog remained, whether with or without sun, and she stood there not ever concealing anything.

I loved, for what I could know. Whereas she blanketed her mind in an emptiness that gave her grace. To step across feeble places, to find herself trapped; as that was, to her, something of a reminder. As memories faded, they’d return at the simplest gesture – of a pair of arms that were open, like gates or a broken dam, and she’d run to that sight. She’d run, take in, and soon find herself mourning before anything ever began.

She’d bleed from wide-open veins, of a color identical to a sunset. While nothing would rise to meet her lips, driven as taste of something bitter, while all to realize would be what falls. To crimson, to fire in rays of a distant, disappearing warmth, all of that falls to kiss her feet, to remind her of something that begs. For what? For what knows its own inevitability. To be inadequate. To be insufficient. To be faulted, like all human matter of flesh that breaks, that wilts, that grows old, though she won’t subside to that. She won’t embrace, because she won’t close chapter after bleak and somber chapter. She won’t close booklets of musical notes, of those that speak her grief to stars that are received with her blindness. She won’t see light, as it makes its presence, since despite a rising sun being also inevitable, she’ll only close that day to remind her of what fell.

To her feet, from her eyes, and back again. To her heart, from damaged recollections, and forward again to repeat itself.

Flash Fiction Piece – “A Pinnacle of Negligence” – 2/27/2023

It was a display. A sight. A sight that had nothing for me to see, for that’s what it was. An absence. Neglect. What did she neglect? All of me, from all of her. A part of her had been torn open wide, by love, than for what love did upon me. I felt its sting. To love, I felt shelter creeping in, though rain kept pouring in. To her, that shelter was a crater. A hole dug inside pure earth, for that would be her grave. Though, there’d be no one around to fill that space.

A neglect, she dealt upon me, as she left without a word to recede back even further into that same crater, that same space. It had been because whether to love, or to her loneliness, all dug areas were like graves, or pits of darkness where all to kiss for her was death. Death has room, as it must be, because she made use of it. All once-emptied corners, of a perfect circle, were replaced with decor to her liking. While none of it conveyed itself as light, she dwelt there, displayed as someone who fights fragility with fragility. Her delicate nature, as it appears to me, withholds. She withdraws herself back to feeling as numb as a corpse might be imagined to be. Lost, directionless, and phantasmal. Passing through, though not letting go. Finding space, setting herself into a place to call home, though nothing stays.

A word. One solid word, to describe her, and I could call that to be, “Fallen”. That word. One dismal word. A fatal singular from a strip of vocabulary that detaches itself perhaps from all motes of intellectualism; though, it must be accurate! Who finds her? Nothing but the dark, of a woman who entered in through me to nurture herself in sameness. She was the same as when alone, in love, with me. With me, with no one, and she fell upon this heart of mine like it was paper. Insecure. Insincere. Unsurprising.

Flash Fiction – “Clogged within Throats” – 1/11/2023

At whose presence? Was he to live? Was he to stay living? For a woman born, and also scorned. She was left to a place, inside fatal ruins, becoming and living for that fatality. He came through, entered through, and brought forth all he could not leave for merely himself. A promise. A gift. Some notion, an answer, for safety that became transparent, held in an undertow, and brought into her dimming hands. To himself, a puddle of rancid water. To her, for her, a stream of gleaming, ruby wine. As red as through bitterness that decorated her life, for he identified with a struggle he had nothing to do with. Though, to become part of it, to be merged in all its confusion, made him central to her benefit. She longed, while he stretched his long arms to take hold and bring close what she simply kept confined.

All that ran from her eyes, puddling around her feet and devouring her stance; to it, he mentioned it, aloud, in words that carried across through those ruins of her soul, “I fled what could have been forever my home. A place, I once found comfort in, and I could have remained there. Although, in that realm, I would lose nothing. Inside of it, I cannot have found myself to be living.”

To her eyes, he found himself identified. He says this, with a gesture to her chin to raise it higher to his stare, his glance that glimmers within view of a thin rays of light from a penetrating sun, “We are both surviving. Surviving for something. Who comes first, might I ask, to be that one, first in line, to love, to seek, and to cherish?”

She did not hear him. However, she saw him. A man whose mind reveals being irreversible to come ever closer to what he, in this convolution, this volatile mode of direction, and who has constructed this maddening den of heartbeats; and for that sight, she expressed her language, “Love has me remembering, not wanting. I cannot endeavor to hear you, after I have seen you. You have come from somewhere far, not someplace that had been close.”

Here are two roses left to drift, to sway and to dance in unpredictable winds. Should a storm develop about their desolate and embracing forms, they’ll try not to cry. They’ll bite down on their flesh, if it means to keep themselves from weeping. If desperation fuels their touch, they’ll touch all the more if to know more about why they’ve become the waves of oceans that feud with each other over the tallest wave. Over the most rapid of tides, or over the smallest of messages that are left inside bottles, written with words motivated by intoxicating transparency and solacing honesty.

Flash Fiction – “In the Gray of every Day” – 600 words – 9/28/2022

Herein lies a crippled horse. He struggles to find a way to walk. Tears have left him burning on a slope that moves his eyes always down. Why will he always look down? To feet that never move him. To scars that never leave him. They are remade to be ripples within hardening soil, though he stays at a land’s peak never comforted from either sunlight or from a soft breeze. Here, he has been cemented to stay. In this spot of a desolate world, shadows have replaced brushes while humid or frigid air has taken the place of any wildlife’s breath.

One step will bring him walking backwards.

Although, a cliff, displayed before him, compels a foresight of his motivation.

A winter has frozen over his soul, blanketing him in a comfort of cessation. One more pebble to toss overboard, into an ocean that has been recreated. This has been done more times than he has counted grains on an unseen shore. This has been done more times than stains have been set into his skin. With those recreated ripples, he can sense his memories. He can sense his eyes, his feet, that carry both his mind and body on a backwards trail. A backwards walk and view, of one that has lassoed his limbs to a crippled horse. A crippled horse that neighs, though has been beaten into a death-like, dream-like state. A carrier for an isolated form that wants to retreat.

Shards of his heart are strewn around. Everywhere, from a bereavement that has loosened contents from storms. All his wishes have melted with unfelt heat or have become unrecognizable ice statues in a more recognizable winter.

Love keeps him salient. Holy. As a man with bruises, scars, and a heart that leaks into an ocean like redrafted clouds, worded over with touches of his forsaken flesh.

Every now and then, his eyes dart upwards to a sky full of light. He notices a sun he cannot look at. He feels raindrops he often mistakes for his tears. To light, or to a sadness that engulfs him when he stands on a cliff praying for hours. To a soul that he hopes will come loosened from clouds to fall in his outstretched arms. To a beauty whose heart has been torn away and has torn open his own, letting flows out to grow nothing but coral and reefs deep in a sea that holds not his reflection. For a beauty whose hair bleeds forth its singular color in every shadow that twists and snakes in wind-sculpted sands. His hands pray, though his arms are reaching for a greenery from remembered eyes that he swears appear in all scents and tastes during when he thirsts.

Despite this risk forward, he will forever steady his stride moving backwards to a hailstorm, to a punishment of rain that falls to dance into becoming serpentine trickles running from his shoulders. All this deceptive outcome, where he stays to pray for a deity to turn around from where it turned its divine back. All for a form to come falling, as any raindrop, to his burning arms. They are longing, while being long, for a nimble form to come back as another echo from one of his many screams.

Despite this risk forward to keep his heart torn open to wind, love waits. It waits to keep itself floating on a lifeboat, of one that has no oars, though will be guided by wind in a random direction. He hopes, beyond a recurring numbness, that it will find its way past disguised lighthouses of suns that were fated to burn out, to crash within his arms and find its way to his heart’s bottom.

Flash Fiction – 400 words – “A Link and the Step” – 6/27/2022

Love remains a fire, roaring in a man’s heart. One long look runs out towards a feeble horizon much like a rope. A rope, a link from one journey to its never-ending stay. He can see that sun falling. It falls, as one tears can, patient upon its place to his cheek. Those tears do fall, walking another type of journey to have no other purpose, other than to feed unnoticed seeds.

At a ground where he digs a layman’s grave, he waits until he can see no more. No light will be wanted by him to re-enter. A sadness makes his hands fold together, while heat has dragged a rush of wind through green upon trees.

His face becomes that eclipse for a coming moon. He wants no light. All on his mind will remain that focus to a third hand, once held in his own, where balance remained a providing companion. Once a warmth bloomed in his soul. Now when fire moves and dances in his heart, its licking tendrils are cold. He faces all earth at his feet, like stepping onto a wintery cloak upon grass. A moving heartbeat, though nothing generates it, to him. Nothing besides undeserved life, at this final hour he whispers a scornful prayer to that intruding moon.

He waits for his eyes to shut, for darkness to become his permanent company. A sun drawing itself over with blankets and a quilt to conceal itself of light. This man walked. This man kept his heart motioning to a journey to be lost. Here, he loses himself, at that sting of love, beguiled by nothing other than humanity’s familiar absence.

At some next second, he captures his memories in a few droplets of rain to see within that faint puddle, cornered within creases in his fingers. Still with few rays of illumination to see what resembles a solid grief, inside that bitter liquid.

Another second to look up at a world of his own, painful to be his own, though still his own. If his eyes close, remain closed, a morning will come. It will set dew, not tears, on his face to warm away that pain. If for another second to be crude to his grief, another day will resemble another leaf for new words. New words, with other fates to steal to this man’s presence with hands not cupping his tears, not reaching for an invisible palm, and not embedded in dark.

Flash Fiction – “Broken Eyes and Nonsense” – 500 words – 6/11/2022

Life comes in ripples. Satisfaction arrives in miniature; it has been said to her, while any evidence had never been whole. In this monarchy of her ways, she gloats without true glow. She taunts an image inside her mirror without always looking its direction. She sees herself. She knows herself, simply as too spirited. A woman of better means, without anything meaningful.

If she might ever have a taste of life, truer life than what she has lived to her current times, she will spit its contents back out. She will chew on it, withdraw that velvet, smooth taste from within it, though will fling them back out from where she analyzed them. She retains curiosity. She disposes of what resembles imperfection.

One man had walked her way. He took her hand. He led her. She led him astray.

She tortured his eyes into white, while his heart fused with his soul as both burned black. He lost himself in her, while she found something to take, while he resided as both stranger and a stagnant friend. There had been nothing to develop out of it. This connection stopped as a fuse to a cannon will, while an army still approaches. It can be noted she still waits for this army. Some advice once given to her, “satisfaction arrives in miniature”, and she offered thought to those words. She offered this thought during occasions she missed marks. Satisfaction. Can it be boring? Can life offer more? Only more? More of what? More of those same intakes, it might be.

Bone dry. Callous. Whereas, wanting. She desires a truth, where others are patient on that arrival. In life, enough patience will tell you to keep hopeful while maintaining that wait. Enough waiting will grant a person nothing.

Her mind, all composed of a rock within rapids, where all things of twigs and farewelled leaves float by. To this woman, those objects are as those clouds hanging in midair, like ravens on nooses. Nothing gets itself absorbed into her, without leaking back out. She sees herself in a mirror, constructed out of oils and dryness. A sliding side on one end, with everything deserted on its other.

At a second of her sensing something truthful, she turns around to see herself in another mirror. She has turned around to find a direction she missed. One opportunity filled with color, while she decides on that as deceit. She turns back to see her image, complicated in status. She recognizes tears falling to smear her reflection into disarray. She sees herself, lets tears fall to a mirror. For that mirror has been placed at her feet. A standing mirror that does not stand. Tears smear her reflection into disarray. An order she knows.

She stays as this. Uncertainty. Tiredness. Broken eyes leaking their inherent disarrangement onto a bitter reflection, worn through. What nonsense of being. What a mask that ties her into a hardened bundle.

Flash Fiction – 250 words – “The Jealous Bird” – Modern Romanticism – 4/30/2022

He held her at arm’s length, counting his feathers. Softness around him. Eyes of an eagle, the beak of an ancient pterodactyl. All to see, with all to bite from flesh. With all those things he saw, he saw himself to swiftly bring close her life in a sharp cancellation.

Their romance, a feud with blood. Bottles lingering in corners. Smokes were all theirs, while the sedation remained never enough. Their faces turned to see sunlight, while soon looking away. Blinding to them, it remained. All their hopes, drowned in a bottle where had been locked one ocean to drink from. A cork to another that had been those largest he tossed at the wall. Staring at broken pieces linger on their floor like this relationship, in all of itself.

He bandages his eyes in knowing she caused it. His suffering. To blame, with her. Although he saw his reflection of evidence to madness, as pieces of his mind, as piece of those bottles he threw, and tears welled in those vacant, disturbed eyes to be ignored.

Jealousy of an eagle in a parakeet’s cage. She had freedom. For him, that recurs as his thought. Storming on, to laugh and laugh even more. Laughing on, to cry and cry no more. Bleeding on, to worship all those wounds that from broken bottles, and his fractured mind, and this termination of a relationship that wept itself to sleep, nothing rehearses itself. He had walked off, condemning her to dust.

Flash Fiction – “Tearing the Ocean Apart” – 350 words – 3/30/2022

The dream.

Our dream. Our eyes are matched, upon the surface.

The walk. My steps are not from the cross, not from the Virgin Mother. I cannot find a way to take this journey. I am as poor as these grains of sand, upon this beach where I stand.

He cannot press his foot onto the water, finding stable and balanceable steps. He wants to, however. He has tried to do this. His appearance is foolish, while he attempts it, again. I want to walk. I want to find something to make a moment truthful. I yearn. This heart yearns. His heart yearns, aches, and threatens to break to turn the ocean to a bright crimson. His heart is a tomb with a biblical corpse, shaped as Lazarus, distorted as Christ. It wants to be the last wave this gleaming sea will crash upon the shore. His heart does not want to say farewell to a thought. His mind is stubborn, telling itself to survive when the heart means to drown it.

If he could shout, he would receive no echo. His voice is but a cry or a whisper, delicate as a newborn and feral as an abandoned child. A man as him lives, if only to cover his face with bedsheets, wanting to eclipse out the sickness. The sunlight against him, and if he stands forever upon this naked shore with its lain beige curtains of sand, he will discover each grain darkening along with his complexion.

Perhaps his sickness will flourish, if he continues himself to this stance of a statue. For he no longer attempts the non-human feat of exploring the ocean with the steps for something either to be revived or reborn, as he stays to stare at a broken image. It is a reflection, stated by him to be matching with someone else, though now remains as his. It is frozen, here. If I walk, I will crash through. I will drown in my heart. I want to get rid of the water. I want to erase it, but that will make my reflection disappear.

If he drowns, he will disappear, not his reflection. He will stare into himself, all the way to the bottom of his heart.

Flash Fiction – 650 words – “As the Two were Leaving” – 3/28/2022

Their version of history. Their eyes. Caught. In a spiderweb of memories, both lovers; no, something more connected; a husband and a wife are here to recall, not renew, their vows. Together, until death do the both of them apart. Until the rottenness of flesh will tear one asunder into the earthen grey, while the other floats in the stinging space of shed physical attachment. The husband is like a star who is losing sight of its surroundings, its galaxy. Moment after moment, connected dots are no longer seen of their connections. A swirling group of masses will become locked in stagnant place, as they will, for a time, be lost to blindness. It is all those things around him that were representative of many collected symbols, of those that resonate with the past going into infinity.

Many things that were surrounding him. Memories of many moments that originated from a larger essence, a bigger star, as one massive sun that will go out.

His wife, his love, the most beautiful of all figures lays upon a porcelain bed, covered with clay sheets molded onto her still-perfect figure to his eyes. In his eyes, she remains as everything as eternity will depict. Still as beautiful, as the time they first met. The ripple of the covers upon her form, closest to himself as he is seated next to her, are dotted with stains from teardrops. Her mouth shows a glimmer that would not be due to life when it now fades, though is because of his kisses. Still the same, that kiss, as the first that, despite death creeping in upon her here, keeps its warmth beyond all delicacy.

But when the two of them are holding hands, reminiscing to endless hours upon what will both haunt and be laid to rest, there is one question being repeated. From one set of lips that are weakly torn open to speak, to the other pair that with its brittle strength can only utter the sentence out of what it clings to. That sentence is, “Are you leaving, or am I?”

It’s a question told from the husband to what is obvious. Whereas it’s a question told from the wife to what does seem to sit still, though reverberates and quivers as though to soon shatter and disappear.

Her form, her eyes, of what is fading, then staring, observed that her husband is doing the same to her limited awareness. Love reignites in the dynamic detonations of dynamite, for the contents of his earthen form made of the fading light from a once-lit fuse to spill upon her to conceal her in his memory’s grave. All that, at one moment, while he is seeing her, settling with her back to the earth, the sea, the depth of his history, breaking into the coziness of the longest rest apart from his arms.

“Are you leaving, or am I?” says the husband, the repetition as one wave before it recedes back to his mouth.

“Are you leaving, or am I?” says the wife, her open lips releasing air, as though the faintest gust of the most powerful wind, enough to pull, not push, him closer to hear her.

They dance in the final moments to this repeated question. They dance in each other’s stars, their histories becoming blank for what will be grieved upon, though life will return to life in a closer recollection. Life will return to him, and to her upon when he is able to relive her in himself. One more teardrop will bloom a flower from roots that are the earth, itself. That last teardrop will reunite a soul with the stars, when the man passes on to, once more, hold the softest hand. One stem to climb straight to Heaven, with nothing more to fall for, while that repeated question is no longer uttered as it will be answered with, “Neither. We were never apart.”

Flash Fiction – “The Impossible Dream” – 3/23/2022

At the edge of a vast ocean, the quantity of water that shows both reflection of our faces and stars, the hanging lights that we see from both angles; and we are wishing for something to stretch our hands out for. Maybe when the miles were longer, we were crippled of our backs and shattered on our glass legs. Were our love able to replace the night with unending warmth, maybe then we’d not find it necessary to wake to see the sun. Maybe if we kept seeing the sun, our sleep would not be kept inside an impossible dream. To reach for the hand that stammers, though it could not be cold when we breathe a warmth to create the waves. Maybe when the tides are looser, we should have found it simpler to see one another, being carried closer to each other, finally together.

If we keep whispering for the same wish, maybe our reflection would disappear, along with the stars, the waves, the life within the breath we exit from our lips in the deepest sleep above the deepest of all oceans. If that same wish was never fulfilled, can we still wake up to see the sun as some warmth for what never was? If we keep talking in our sleep, pulling back curtains to see the night for its disappearing moonlight and starlight, maybe we will find each other in the same dream, hoping for the same warmth, the same reflection with the same ending to a nightmare that was never real.

Flash Fiction – “A Crashing Spark” – 450 words – 2/13/2022

She undresses herself to the perpetuating tune. The offset of the offbeats, running ripples in soundwaves through heatwaves. There is an aridness to the room she stands in. Her clothes fall like landslides from her velvet flesh, though were loose to begin with.

A pair of eyes, glancing to riveting nudity. A man sees a moment for a viper, to be the fangs buried in the vulnerability. The trust she expects is amiable and admirable. Her surroundings are whitewashed and vapid, while drawn to the expert’s stroke of a brush along to create, for a viewer’s sake, painful streams of portraiture and vacant urns. Her own eyes, her look of sadness; there is a weight in her from an emptied safe. It yet holds weight, even while her screams will come to soar a perfused form.

Gliding forth as the freed, encaged bird in a pair of arms that wrap as both bandages and curtains. She is freed – thrown; she is drowned – burned. Pierced. The heart before the flesh. Her eyes close to look up. In darkness and in pleasure, while feathers from broken or clipped wings are behind a divided mind.

He washes himself in her skin. She conceals and connects her skin to sin, whispering what her thoughts escape. Out of a mouth, the pauses come, more than the words. The waiting game; the fading of sun in the heart to be permanent with the moon. Waiting for the minute to perish in the crevices, the scars. Her highs are the same as the lows. His face finds her deep in sensation. His view is blinded in the bond. Hand on her neck. Eyes down her throat. What a view in seeing what is, once again, all over with the dying light of an exhausted candle, becoming raw in its undisguised wish. That is, to be the martyr, the whore; he sees her more in space than in grace.

High heels are wheels. Fingers exist to linger, to hush the lips and cancel the breath. She turns to burn against someone else’s scar, where in hoping to find vague renewal in beautiful connection, she ends the idea in a bed of warm softness and cold metal.

Walking in her eyes, speaking more than her mouth, will entertain us for a feast. We could feed or we could speak, finding the tears that descend upon us to hit the plate as tidal waves. Will we notice what splashes us? It is different in two directions. One of lies, the other of truth.

What she likes is not what she loves.