Flash Fiction: Graduating

I was older once.  Back in a day where innocence was for the young, I washed my hands of adventure and looked down my nose when nothing would look up at me. Back in a time when time sorted itself into tiny labeled boxes, I splashed my face with regret at the multitude of boxes that contained only emptiness.  Back in an age where age became irrelevant, I counted my wrinkles with quivering fingers and smiled at my own smile because I could find nothing else to smile at.

I became younger the day I died, graduating from this life to the next.  I started over again, retaining the knowledge I had but losing the harrowed hardening that had toughened my skin.  I said much in few words rather than the nothing in many to which I was accustomed.  I lived death with more conviction but fewer convictions than I had lived life.

I do not see myself in the future, because only the future can see me now.  It is a one-way mirror in which my reflection flickers.  It is a two-way street in which we race past each other without noticing.  My future is the only thing connecting me to my past.

Crunch (Flash Fiction: Day 17)

Prompt: chocolate

Crunch. Crunch. My tennis shoes are turning brown as the icy mud begins to coat their surface. My lungs are withering as my body pushes itself to its limit, dodging the puddles of ice and crashing down on the fallen fir branches. It is 7:02 on a Tuesday morning in January, and I am late for the bus.

Five Years Old (Flash Fiction: Day 14)

Prompt: The color yellow

It was his Birthday with a capital B.  He had just learned about capital letters.  It was hard to keep them all straight, but B was easy because it was at the beginning.  Birthdays didn’t happen very often.  He couldn’t remember his last one, although sometimes Mommy and Daddy and his older brother and sister talked about it.  His last birthday had been about Balls.  That started with a B too.  He had had those extra-bouncy Superballs on his cake.  He wished he could remember more, because he really liked Superballs.  But this year was about Yellow.  His entire party was going to be Yellow.  He had yellow balloons, a yellow cake, and was wearing his favorite yellow polo shirt.  Everything was bright and happy like sunshine.

The only thing that bothered him was that his baby sister kept crying.  It wasn’t right that anyone should be crying on a day that was supposed to be happy.  He tried to cheer her up by showing her the yellow balloons, but she only tried to bite him.  He didn’t care about the biting because she didn’t have any teeth, but he was sad that she couldn’t be happy.

While Mommy vacuumed the house, he sat patiently in chair decorated with yellow streamers and watched the clock.  Telling time still confused him, but Daddy had told him that his friends would start coming when the big hand hit 12.  He was excited to see his friends.  They would be excited too, because they would get to eat cake and play games.  It had only rained a little bit that morning, so maybe they could play Cops and Robbers among the damp trees.

He watched cars go past the window, but his vision was interrupted by as smudge.  The window was dirty.  He hopped down from his perch and went to get the Windex.  While he mopped up the offending patch, his baby sister crawled up and put her chubby palm on the glass, chuckling with glee.

“No!” he cried, without thinking.  His sister’s toothless grin immediately froze and she whimpered, ready to belt out her complaints.

“Oh,” he said, realizing that this was the first time she had smiled in an hour or so.  ”Oh no.  Stay happy.” Talking wasn’t very fun; usually his brother was around to translate for him, so words weren’t necessary.  But his brother was upstairs reading, so it was up to him to calm the crying baby.  He sat down and talked nonsense syllables at her, words that didn’t need to be words, until she calmed down and smiled at him again.

“Good baby,” he said, smiling back.  He looked up at the clock again.  The big hand was almost at the 12! He heard a knock at the door and saw Mommy walk over to answer it and talk grown-up talk with his friends’ mommies.  He looked at his baby sister and tickled her under her chin.  She laughed.  He laughed back.  All was right with the world.

 

Different Life (Flash Fiction: Day 13)

Prompt: Another day

Brian yawned.  It was 7:30 on a Saturday morning, but the sun streaming through his window poked him fully awake.  He lay there for a few minutes, then got up and scrambled some eggs for breakfast.  Elise was coming over, so he vacuumed the floor to provide some semblance of cleanliness.  He dusted off the pictures of his college graduation and sighed when he reached the picture of his mother, who had died the year before.  Passing the bookcase of well-worn books, he thought briefly of all the vast amounts of knowledge he had crammed into his head.  Was his electrical engineering degree worth all those sleepless nights and hundreds of thousands of dollars?  Was his successful job worth the monotony of his life?  His glance flit over to the cello that lay untouched in the corner.  He reached out for it, brushed some of the dust off, then started as the doorbell rang.  Elise.  He prepared himself for small talk, something he’d never been good at.  Maybe in a different life.

Brian yawned.  It was 7:30 on a Saturday morning, but the sun streaming through his window poked him fully awake.  This was way too early to be up on a weekend.  He had been out until 2 am the night before after a performance with his string quartet at Carnegie Hall.  They had premiered a piece by some up-and-coming young composer that Brian wasn’t a huge fan of, but it wasCarnegie Hall after all.  He groaned as the drinks from the after-party the night before pounded from the inside of his head.  Food.  He should probably eat food.  He mentally ravaged the inside of his refrigerator.  There was still leftover lobster from a fancy restaurant gig he had played a few days before.  Lobster for breakfast. It would have to do. He had achieved quite a bit of success as a musician, but he still relied on free food for most of his meals.  The thought briefly wandered through his mind: What would have happened if he had pursued that electrical engineering degree his mother had wanted? He sighed at the thought of his mother, bless her soul.  She had been so proud of him, but she had so wanted him to carry on his father’s business.  He groaned as the doorbell rang.  It would be his manager.  He prepared himself for business talk, something he’d never been good at.  Maybe in a different life.

 

The Performance (Flash Fiction: Day 12)

Prompt: heartstrings

(This is the first I’ve written about music, which excites me!)

In the hush before her fingers first brush against the keys of the grand piano, time seems to stop for me.  She freezes against the wind of passing years, memories hurdling across her motionless face and into the depths of my mind.

She is eighteen again, her hair flying in the wind as she swings through the air at the children’s playground, pulling the chains back until she nearly flips over backwards.  She is nineteen, crying on the sofa at the death of her parents until my own heart nearly breaks for her.  She is twenty, grim-faced, with falsified smiles layered over each other so I can barely find her real self. And now she is twenty-one, sitting at the piano bench that has become her home, ready to unleash her soul for the scattered audience that has drifted into the hall today.

Time begins to move again, and with it comes the pain of reality.  I hear her inhale in preparation for throwing herself once again into the agony of performance.  Her eyelids flutter closed as she suddenly strikes the first grating chord, fingers flying across the keyboard with an anger she has never physically displayed.

The piece is a swirling frenzy of harsh rhythms and dissonant harmonies.  As the weight of her arms nearly lifts her off the piano bench, I feel similarly suspended in the single moment of beauty that is her nine-minute long performance.  The undiluted essence of her being overwhelms me, first lulling me into flight through the incommunicable, then stinging me across the face with sudden changes of mood.

When she finishes her performance, I can feel sweat tingling along my backbone, shaking me into reality none too gently.  I make my way up to the stage, my gaze directed towards the piano rather than to her.  I want to see if my theory is correct.

I peer into the instrument, shuddering at the realization of what lies within.  She has torn out my heart and replaced the strings of the piano with its material.

 

Living Dreams (Flash Fiction: Day 11)

She spent the night lying awake in bed, staring at the shape drawn crudely on her wall.  It had not been there when she had first gone to bed, promptly at 10 pm as was her habit.  Forty-five minutes later, something had startled her out of her sleep and into a state of terror that was illuminated by the single bright lightbulb she had made sure to turn off before climbing onto her bare mattress.

She could have called her mother, but her mother had hung up on her the day before after a screaming fit over what she had done with her life.  She could have called her father, but her father had disappeared into the anonymity of workplace answering machines.  She could have called the police—but she didn’t take that idea seriously.  They would probably just laugh at her and tell her to go to bed.  It was what she was trying to tell herself.

As the minutes ticked past, the shape seemed to blur before her eyes, filling out and becoming almost realistic in its shading.  She rubbed her eyes and considered putting in her contacts, but decided she wasn’t going to play along like that.

If she had been afraid of monsters as a child, things might have been different.  She might have summed up her long-avoided courage and taken to the wall with a wet rag until her nightmares disappeared from its surface.  But it was to her detriment that she had been raised by over-rational parents.  She decided she must have forgotten to turn off the light.  She must not have noticed her niece scribbling on the wall the other day.  Or perhaps she was still sleeping.

If she was, it was a painfully long dream.

It was two in the morning when the terror that had never haunted her as a child began to rise up and mock her attempts at apathy.  Why this particular shape?  Why would her niece, only two years old, have drawn such an accurate sketch of her deepest longing?

She felt herself shifting with the picture, imitating its contours, feeling its colors rise up in her own body.  She fell into waves of what could have been either slumber or the deepest kind of awareness, rocking back and forth with the drawing on the wall.

It was five in the morning when the wall began to creak and shudder and throb with a living heartbeat.  Stepping out of bed, she walked towards it and put her hand against the drawing, which was now completely black against the white wall.  The heartbeat pulled her into its embrace and heaved its way out of the plaster.  She gave a startled gasp before smiling with the realization that her lifelong dream was coming true.

The next morning saw a black horse curled up on the mattress, whinnying its contentment.

 

Coalescence (Flash Fiction: Day 10)

Prompt: Essence of _____

Tomorrow, Ruth would have gone out to eat with us at the Chinese restaurant by the lake.  We would have stuffed ourselves with greasy egg rolls and inauthentically cooked vegetables and then dangled our toes into the lime green lake to see who could pull out the most algae with their feet.  We would have run away through the fountain when the ducks came out to beg for bread because Ruth always had an inexplicable fear of ducks.  Then we would have sat on the grass and stared up at the fir branches swaying high above us.  Ruth would have said something about how the sky looked like the top of a snow-globe that we must be trapped in.  Then we would have been silent for a few minutes, imagining that we were inert specks waiting to be shaken up by some force outside of the snow-globe.

The shaking came before tomorrow did.

When the tornado winds first hit, no one took them seriously.  We lived in the Northwest, after all; we didn’t have tornados over here. Ruth and the other girls were at my house, playing board games, when the trees began to fall.  Thundering crash after thundering crash interrupted our entertainment, and we huddled in fear by the old fireplace, watching branches hurl themselves into oblivion outside the window.

Ruth panicked.  She had always been the level-headed one, but this time she panicked.  ”I have to go home!” she cried, and dashed outside.  We screamed at her to come back, but only the wind screamed back at us.

When they found our bodies, Ruth was the one they contacted first.  She had made it down the street to the crawl space under her house without injury, just before the two towering firs behind my house cracked under the pressure of the wind and flung their heavy branches through the walls and windows and into our cowering bodies.

We watch Ruth now, as she struggles through the tomorrows that for us will never come.  Every tear she sheds pierces through the gap in the snow-globe, and we can taste the salt.  Gradually, she grows away from our memories, fogging up the glass until we can barely see her dancing through the air.  One day she will join us on the outside, and we will once again share our souls with each other.  Until then, she must continue her journey on her own.

 

The Doors (Flash Fiction: Day 9)

Prompt: Chance

The demons are especially harsh tonight.  I can feel them weighing down on my mind like anvils balancing on my sanity.  Everywhere I look, I see instruments of death: knives, scissors, razors, even forks and pencils seem threatening to me right now.  I fall on my knees and sob, but no tears come.

There are three doors.  Behind one of them lies the joy I sometimes dream of on the nights I am able to sleep. Behind the other two lie the stuff my nightmares are made of. Fate has pushed me violently to make a choice, but I am refusing, too fearful of choosing the wrong door.

Blackened remains of dried tears have hardened onto the corpses of hopes I used to have. They have piled up around my mind and try to suffocate me.  There is nothing I can do but pray.

Today is the day that the doors will open and reveal their secrets. I wait, counting the seconds as they tick away. I can do nothing else but wait.  I try to take in every detail of what is left of my sanity so I can remember it after the moment has passed.  I wait, wondering what it was like to smile.

The only sentiment I can still cling to is gratefulness.  I know I am a different person than I was before the demons came.  I know they have twisted and perverted me until I am almost unrecognizable.  However, I also know that my soul is safe.  I know that deep down I am still me, even though the demons say otherwise.

Fate is precisely on time.  She works that way.  I shiver, and the doors open.

 

Confessions of a Schizophrenic (Flash Fiction: Day 8)

Prompt: Three reasons

They say my sanity is leaving me.  They say I need to be under psychiatric care.  They say I’m a danger to myself and others. Give me three reasons why they are wrong.

I can’t do that. I can’t affirm everything you say.  So what if you’re clinically insane? So what if the worlds that exist in your mind aren’t visible to anyone else? It’s a gift from the God they don’t believe in.

Reason number one: Insanity is freedom.  Sanity confines.

They think there’s more than one of me in my head.  They think you are not real.

I’m real to you.  You are yourself.  They can’t change who you are.

The medications are killing you.  I don’t want to be friendless.  Can you stay with me?

The doctors are trying to make us better.  They don’t know us.  We don’t have to conform to their standards of “human.”

Reason number two: Being a person is better than being a patient.

These halls are too bright.  This food is too rubbery.  The air is too stale.  They want to make us real people again, but they put us in a cage.

I am leaving you now.  You will be all right on your own.  Remember me.  I am free to leave this place.  You will learn to call it home.

Reason number three: I am not a person, for they do not treat me as such.

Cages.  Confinement. Prison. Insanity was my only friend.

 

Adjustment (Flash Fiction: Day 7)

Prompt: Where will it be found?

He left one day, tired of the way she bossed him around.  ”Do this, do that, stay here, don’t you dare leave me,” she would say any time he tried to sneak out.  This time, he didn’t care.  He was sick of the responsibility placed on him to keep up her well-being at all times.  Deep down, he knew that it would also be good for her if he left.  He had always been the voice of reason, the one who would tell her she was staying up too late or working too hard.  Without him, she would be forced to find her way for herself.

She went into shock when she realized he was gone. She stayed in bed for days, panicking every time anyone asked her a question.  Finally, the doctor came and told her gently that he could bring him back.

“Please do,” she said.  ”I don’t know who I am outside of him.”

And so it was that the doctor brought back her sanity.