Flash!

Flash Fiction, first published at http://flash-frontier.com/


An Aphonic Discourse
Silence screams an awkward glance over its shoulder to someone else who might be listening: the voyeur behind the musty drapes. I smell of those drapes, I smell sadly of their terrifying stories. I look under rugs of matted hair and insects for a trapdoor out of here. If it was a matter of communication it’d be easy, but the more said the less heeded. Skin and bones of sentences wilt lamely where they should stand proudly singing, freed of fat. Conversation is no bird tonight.

Hayley rocks on aching feet, stirs cubed beef into thick sauce, waits for her husband to come home.

Panic sets in. Peristalsis forces words to the surface. They hurt: the difficulty of their conception; their birth. Take them, sculpt them into what you will.

Unseemly custard-yellow foam innards spill through the oven mitt’s floral cotton casing into the pristine kitchen – threaten to overflow into the pot, spoiling the meal.

I imagine a time when my speech is sea and surges with regard for neither sand nor stone. Each lofty crest releases the finest misty nuance, brushes your face with meaning. Flowing from my lips, cold and thinly layered, water on a desert skin.

Unwelcome splinters of images of Brad cause her to flinch.

Your clothes I hate, your scent I hate, everything I hate. Love you? I can never love you.

Hayley vigorously attacks the coagulating mixture with a shallow steel spoon, her blue-black arm stirring in bruised, ever-decreasing, claustrophobic circles.

Framed Excerpt.

Framed Excerpt.

Ninety-nine.

From the collection '8 poems about me and you'.

Ninety-nine

of the infinite number of ways I might die

the spectre whose shape fills my deathly dull days

the ritual I'm drawn to despite what I've said

my stoic assertion 'I'm fine on my own'

my penchant for wishing to leave with a bang

involves only me warm in sun on my bed 

a view with soft sleep and no pain 

and the touch of another (i'll take it all back)

to not be alone at the end.

Teresa.

... "I know writers don't like to talk about their projects until they're finished. Put to bed... isn't that how you say it?" William blushed and felt a prickle of sweat in the small of his back. What did she look like asleep he wondered? "So I won't be nosy as to what it's about. Unless you'd like to share?" She raised her immaculately tapered eyebrows. They wriggled almost into the shape of an italicised question mark. A mocking tone; or Teresa was genuinely interested. He couldn't tell. Her eyes gave nothing away, were like glass buttons. And that innuendo, what's that all about?  He didn't dare answer his own thought in case he was wrong...

Experience.

The woman extended her lithe hand and gently clasped his swollen palm. She held it against her cheek. 'We're all dying,' she said, 'some more slowly than others.'  'The next person you see', I displayed to the man in a frenzy of swirling green neon letters, 'tell them that I asked you to remember and relay this episode so that you at least have a shared experience. I know how lonely it can get.'

Reflection.

He sampled the future in echoes of the past, made are were, before is even was.

He transgressed, then transgressed again. He overslept, shamefully overslept, his world reduced to the space between two sheets. Unsustainable, unacceptable as an adult. Frequently achieved. 

He did a wonderful impersonation of a reasonable man.

His mouth was a crooked scar on a plump face.

Lopsided and tightly incised. Shaving, he looked sullenly into his reflection, then cast his eyes down to the basin. The water was black, which is as natural a colour for water as any other. His mood was similarly dark, a tint so familiar, so frequently applied as to become its natural tone too. He longed for a lightness.

Read.

The book I picked up and found my Self in read thus:

I cannot be certain how long I stood in the same place, here on ice, in stasis, waiting for instructions on how to tame the words that flew from me and create with them a narrative of some reliability. Most likely it was squezzillion times infinity. I felt the urge to go and do things. I had the words and language surging crazily around me leaving neon green vapour trails, but they never seemed to form into a coherent and vital plot. I began to hallucinate. The moon waxed and waned on numerous occasions, which means something in your world, but was out of sync with nature and the fundamentals of time in mine.

Beginnings.

...Before I was born, people did not know who I was.

My conception was a work of art. My father had died only an hour prior, but his spermatozoa had the presence of mind to continue his work. Abstract Expressionism maybe, like the 'white-writing' of Mark Tobey or the painterly application of Jackson Pollock. Hundreds of intricate strokes that helped describe my form. An asemic continuum if you will. (And you must!) 

My birth was similarly a creation of fine art. My Mother had been a blank canvas until I was writ large upon her, and sadly, after months of incubating a life's work, she died delivering her masterpiece. I was extracted from my amniotic sanctuary 6 weeks prematurely. An over-proofed yet somehow under-edited baby boy.

Cover.

Work in progress of the cover for my yet to be published unauthorised autobiography, The Ghostwriter in the Machine.

Burn.

After 20 years of marriage Brad hardly engaged his wife in anything more  complex than the rituals of a comfortable friendship. He and Hayley seldom fought, and it seemed to her that Brad was tired and damp, and couldn’t become incendiary even if he tried. In fact Brad was something of a peacemaker between her and Verity. He detested the fuse of conflict that mother and daughter were able to light, burn fiercely and then extinguish, as if he were afraid that it may get out of control and that things said out loud might burn the family unit and cause it to disintegrate.

Colour Plate.

Psyngularity.

Plastic people

with plastic souls

are more complex than you imagine.

Story.

Newly published short story available for download at:


http://bit.ly/xarDzc


Download it. Read it. Go on.

Crunching.

He'd begun to feel a dislocation from everything that had felt familiar and pleasant. Simple conversations were now crunching and stressful; he was missing a beat. Did others recognise this in him? Did they too feel this way and it was life marching naturally forwards. Age letting us know that age mattered. Were they observing and commenting on how out of step he was or was this paranoia a symptom of his state?

Sale.

there's a garage sale in a seaside town

this Saturday, 7am start, NOT BEFORE!

plenty of bric-a-brac:

candlewick bedspread, books, dining table and 5 chairs 

(one missing – don't know what happened to it),

tools, clothes, an old television (still goes)
a telescope, hammock, map of the coast,

a birdcage, briefcase, electric lawnmower,

some pick-up-sticks and a deck of cards (complete!).

little will sell;

the buying happens over the road 
at the new red shed –

where guaranteed warranties 
are as cheap as chips.

but never mind! 

the locals still 
will come along

to natter, to chat,

to complain a bit 

about this and that;

(price of milk, price of fuel, price of progress).

"sub-divison up the way's coming along at a rate of knots,"

they'll say, 

one judgmental eye 
on the bright concrete driveway 

snaking behind
the bulldozed section past 

'weatherboard' (kitset) houses

blocking the sea, the horizon, the view 

beyond tables laden with 40 years 

of domestic history,
and one judgmental eye 
on the overpriced 
used cutlery.

Instinct.

Memory at 1 day old sounds implausible, but it was so for me. Even if you have now forgotten incidents of that time, at that moment you would remember from second to second. Otherwise you would not learn. Some instinctual and automated responses are built-in, like breathing, crying when hungry, fear of harm; along with these are memories that teach us to shape external influences for a desired response. I just happen to have excellent recall. Some do. This is both a curse and a blessing. The detail of my first breath is as graphically disturbing to me now as that of my first word. That word was 'Help'. Besides, the evidence shows that even if we can't process meaning, our brain is conscious. It remains conscious for up to 30s after decapitation; it may even have happened already. This could be the last sentence you...

Aphonic.

They say he is a closed book. He’d say, if he could, that he is devoid of Words and Language. People attempt to prise him open; to study his contents for fragments of meaning; to read him and know what makes him so. But he knows he’s an authorial fraud; his pages are empty, his contents non-existent. Life is narrated for him; writes itself, it seems. He crafts no Words and Language of his own. He is an impostor in another’s text. I ask him, ‘Does this mean anything to you or is it all just words? This poetic prose pared to lean syntax, the satisfied sigh of the last line, the simple beauty of the story – is it soundless or does it speak to you? He does not reply.

Fame.

Mine was a symptom of a larger malaise. The vast loneliness of humankind produces an endless longing to be heard. An individual's obsession with their perceived birthright to be lauded, and granted 15 minutes of fame, is merely a lament out loud. Everyone always striving to give a 'shout out'. Look at me! Listen to me! A desperate plea for someone, anyone out there listening for their call, ready to hear them, admire them, attest to their existence. For silence is emptiness, is death. I needed to feel again to be inspired, to be exhausted, or I may as well be dead.

Asemic continuum.