October 1, 2011
Love, Luck, Life

I shook a man’s hand on Tuesday and by Thursday he was dead. Life cues the credits much too early, as a good movie you never want it to end and you’re left with an empty popcorn box filled with regret for not getting the free refill because the good part is coming up, you can feel it. Afterwards you realize how much you’ve been ripped off, but it’s too late, and throw out your proof of purchase along with the empty sweets, here one moment gone the next.

His obituary didn’t say how he died, just that he was a loving father and husband, recently widowed. We are only given a set amount of time to live, and I think half of that time is attributed to luck, the other half to love. When you lose the one you love, life is just a fifty-fifty chance.

As a kid you think the first person you meet and fall in love with is your soul mate. What they didn’t tell you is how new love feels every time it hits you, and how different it is for each person you fall for.

Love is as precious as life, and luck has nothing to do with it, but judging from that man’s smile after our hands unhooked, chances are he lived a good life.

(Source: ibronco.blogspot.com)

9:38am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/Zj_U4yA8xkB6
(Notes: 6)
  
Filed under: prose life love death luck writing 
September 22, 2011
She Who Flees

She fled into the desert, and the stranger followed. It was getting hot, the sun hot on the back of his neck. That pack mule dropped dead between the two towns who’s names were as faint as the horizon piercing the desert. He couldn’t help but think she had something to do with that. There were miles of brown sand caked on his cracking boots, and his holster strap, criss-crossed across his chest, was in need of generous oiling. He had come upon a shanty, her smell lingered in the stale air. Inside was a man hovering over an open fire, cooking something that smelled like fish.

“Are you she,” he said to the man.

“Missed her. Maybe two, three days ago. Perhaps longer.” 

“Have you food and lodge?”

“Indeed. If you’ll spare my life.” He looked at the revolver tucked on the hip.

“Be spared if your words hold true.”

“Won’t know until it’s too late.”

This woman whom he chased was known to create elaborate illusions. The sun could have cooked his brain to irrationality. However, the grime on the walls, crawling from the top of the wooden ceiling to the bottom of the dry, dry ground felt too real to be a misdirection. So he took his chances with this man, in hopes of catching she who flees. 

“Head North,” said the man. “She told me East but I seen her head North.”

The stranger would go West, then, and chase her until she stopped running.

His guns were ready.

8:10pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/Zj_U4y9q5x0z
(Notes: 5)
  
Filed under: prose short fiction flash fiction fiction writing 
September 20, 2011
Old Man in the Valley

“There’s magic in those hills,” said the old man. His face wrinkled inward, and he smelled of the tobacco he stuffed into his pipe with fingers that popped as he moved. He continued to speak of the lights that dip from the sky, the black tongued chants sounding from the groves, the howling—man or beast he did not know—by the springs. I wondered his being here, at the base where mist stuck to your skin like a leach, if he made his home near. He reared his head to titter and pointed sharply to a tree. From the tree protruded a knob; the hinges barely visible. “One man’s home is another man’s prison,” he said, and invited me in. A crow perched in the middle of the single room and shouted through the valley. I declined food and drink but he insisted the road ahead was a wasteland, the vegetation scarce and waters poisonous. Shadows and death in the valley, magic and craft in the hills. Fear said the crow. So I had some tea. The old man clinked his overgrown nails on the surface of his mug and gazed through the window. “You’ll stay here tonight,” he said. “And continue onward in the morning.” He watched the sun set and my bones iced over to the sounds of a creature’s howl. I rested my head on the cot, forcing my body awake, as the old man howled back to the sounds of the night.

2:51pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/Zj_U4y9ko5bj
(Notes: 12)
  
Filed under: flash fiction short fiction short writing prose 
September 19, 2011
Cheaters on Ice, and Justice for All

There was enough of a lull between rain drops for the detective to light a cigarette and take a deep drag. It tasted like rusted copper. She fingered it until it burned out while the cop with the familiar face was briefing her.  The body of a headless man was rotting in the dumpster.

“He’s got no ID, either,” said the cop. “We’ve got a ring on his finger. Two hearts etched inside in the middle. Forever Loved written before and after.”

“I’ll take the ring,” she said. They would have found the body sooner or later. “Am I the only person you called in on this?”

He nodded his head.

“Are you good at keeping secrets?”

He nodded his head, and told her about some paper work. She said she’d take care of it, as long as he kept quiet about this Jon Doe.

“You knew him?” he said.

“Yes.”

“Did you…”

Kill him?

“Too many question will send you back to pushing papers,” she slammed the dumpster lid and hurried back cold and wet to her apartment to put the ring in the freezer beside the head of her husband. She grabbed a quart of double chocolate ice cream abreast some frosted hairs of the head and sat down at the kitchen table, thinking. Maybe letting the cop go was the wrong decision. Trust is a hard bond to share, even after years of yarning it can wear to shatter. This cop had the same looking face as the one in the freezer. The detective made room for the ice cream and an available space for another head, and walked back outside in the cold, rainy night to once again make the wrong things right.

1:46pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/Zj_U4y9iLlED
(Notes: 5)
  
Filed under: flash fiction short fiction prose writing 
September 14, 2011
Doors of Darkness

Insanity has possessed me; by evidence of this imprisoning institution, but also perchance a dream, no, a nightmare, carrying with it the revelation of a dark knowledge proved unavoidable. My friend, Arthur, penned many marvelous works up until his last few narratives, which held the weight of a strange and unnerving burden, shown course by his haggard face. They found his limp body swinging from the limb of a tree outside his estate. He had been a distant memory until he appeared in my dream. He led me to a dark place below several flights of winding stairs, a cellar place, oozing with black slime, interrupted by red puss, all flowing from the source: a locked chamber door, hinged and latched, ready to collapse under the weight of the pounding from what was behind it. One wall was fixed with a makeshift desk of rotten wood, a typewriter holding a block of papers with etchings of ancient hieroglyphics scrawled in blood. Arthur screamed and scratched his face until it bled. I retreated to one of the walls and felt the slime reaching for my skin. He wrote with a crimson dipped finger on one of the pages and ordered me to complete what he was unable to finish. “They demand it,” he said, and pointed to the door. “I must go, leave now, or they’ll take you, too.” He started for the door and opened the latch. I chased in rescue but was too late. There on the abysmal edge was an evil too gruesome to describe. The recollection of which pricks my spine with ice. Screams from that darkness fills my mind, even now. I sleep to dream, to replay this horror, to finish what they demanded. I dream to hear their whispers, that Arthur may find peace.

That I may find peace.

12:37pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/Zj_U4y9WGCmw
(Notes: 4)
  
Filed under: flash fiction short short fiction writing prose 
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