Tag: drabble. flash fiction

Just Before Sunset

The waxing moon hung in a diaphanous cloud.  He remembered to look down just before he flew over the river.  There she was, looking up.  He could count on her.  Every evening, at sunset, looking up; looking for him.  Once she waved and seemed to beckon him.

As a youngling, he’d considered trying to meet her, his faithful watcher.  But one of the elders, his grandfather or a great uncle, had warned him off.  “Not a good idea.  Women like that are untrustworthy.”

As he grew older, he grew to understand why.  She was a human.  He was a crow.

Image by Robin Anderson

Female Trouble

She was leaking.  Again.  It seemed only to happen in public.  At home it was never a problem.  She could sit for hours reading or working out mathematical equations.  Even when staring at the clouds or stars and theorizing, there was no seepage.

But out shopping, at tea, in a ballroom and especially at the subscription library, she had only to open her mouth and the trickle, then torrent, of her words, opinions and knowledge flooded the air.

Her intelligence on hideous display and before she could ratchet her jaw shut, the whispers began all round.

“Bluestocking.”

Image: Portrait of MME De Graffigny by Pierre Mignard via flickr commons

Brain Fog

Have you ever driven on a foggy morning?  Diffuse grey light wraps around trees, utility poles and buildings.  No hard edges to alert you.  Are you traveling fast? Or slowly?  Time is compressed, attenuated or smoothed out.  Your brain eventually tricks you into seeing black and white dots swimming in the fuzzy air.

Pandemic is like that.  Time becomes flat and we are all dots floating in space.  Getting nowhere fast.  Or slowly.

Image by Jason Strull via Unsplash.com

Skyhawk

In his carefree youth, he and the camera were inseparable.  When a daredevil friend took him flying in a one engine plane, the camera went along.  They flew off the coast, over the Pacific, getting the bird’s eye of trees, cliffs and sea stacks, cold wind seeping into the cockpit.  He clicked the shutter a hundred times.  Back on earth, he printed a dozen images.  In one, the sepia sea gleams like glass, the sky stretches into silence.

Much later, his adult children gaze at the old photograph, smell naphtha-kerosene and feel the dip and rattle of the Skyhawk.

Image by Chris A Anderson, courtesy of the Estate of Chris A Anderson

RITUAL?

Quintuplet Cluster, NASA on the Commons

Up, down, up, down, updown.

The weird choreography of gnats in the late winter sunlight, rising in unison from the incense cedar and bouncing in the chilly, bright air.  A constellation of illuminated bioplasm.  Is it a communal mating ritual?  An invitation to passing birds to come, feast?  A celebration of approaching seasonal change?  All of that? None?

Faster and faster, the frenzied dance brings their tiny grey bodies together, until they are a single whirling orb of gossamer fluff.

Bang!

They resettle, simultaneously, into the cedar.  The sun shines, the breeze stirs.

And then again, up, down, up, down.

Image by NASA via flickr.com/commons
“Quintuplet Cluster”

This Beach, In Summer

Photo by Ray Hennessy on Unsplash

This beach, in summer, is full of life; Bright human life, pushing all other bits of consciousness aside.

A family group, mostly males, flying dangerously large kites to the squealing encouragement of the females.  Elders, walking slowly and frowning at their mates, but mostly perturbed by the shenanigans of youngsters.   Volleyballers, runners, sitters, sunbathers, readers.  Solitary walkers with bumptious dogs.   And a boy who named himself “Siegfried the Dog”.  A single child at sunset, bent in contemplation of a seashell as the tide slips quietly out.

Oh for the cold, sandblasted landscape of winter, when we others will have space.

 

Featured image by Ray Hennessy via Unsplash.com

 

The Perverseness of Blackberries

He tried to be a good neighbor but the guy next door was a challenge.  His own yard was pristine, weed free, bark dusted.  But at the fence a blackberry intruded, snaking its prickly way into his suburban paradise.  He cut it back, it returned.  Again and again.  Finally, hoe in hand, he walked next door requesting access to remove the briar at its source.  Permission granted, smirkingly.  A ten minute search at the property line yielded a leafless  thread of vine.  The full glory of the pest only manifested itself on his side of the fence.

Image by Molly Francis via Unsplash.com