We swam with water moccasins, rippled surfaces with stones, dreamt under blue skied blankets, rocked to wave rhythms slapping undersides of boats like persistent mothers, their concerns a muffled backdrop to bugs, the feel of silt, a blade of grass, a cloud, a song, a taunt, the flesh of fruit. #50WordFiction#DarkSummer
@RiversideBryan I love it. This would have fit nicely with my #50WordFiction yesterday, the prompt word--"shade." If you ever want to do a writer/photographer collab, give me a shout. 💜 🦋
On the restaurant patio, string lights glowed under the purpling sky. It was cold for Florida, and I was numb and well into my second margarita, the street’s dirt and exhaust a stark contrast to the lush greenness of my first Orlando visit on a girlhood train trip from Arkansas.
The toxin paralyzes. If prepared with skill, the organs are the last to fail. One can spend days trapped in their body, from the initial loss of feeling, to when the lungs stiffen. And from there it takes seven minutes to suffocate. I have that skill—how was your drink?
My childhood face accosted me with acrid comments from the wrought-iron-framed tabletop mirror I bought because it reminded me of the mirror that I kept on my girlhood vanity desk. I love you, I said to the face. She frowned but was silent. Maybe I’ll think about that, she said.
Random #50WordFiction, just coz. More like #autofic I'm about to read some more Lydia Davis and she's rubbing off on me.
My son sends me a picture of the meal he is enjoying with my ex in Mexico after a day of fishing---no faces, but the hands and shoulder of a person I don’t recognize. But then I realize it must be him, and I’m sad I’m no longer sure.
Lanie felt drifty, like a gossamer web blowing with every breeze until one day she detached and flew free, floating over the highway, over the city, over her childhood home, out to the sea at sunset. She would stay here a while, she thought. There was a lot of sea.
My mind insists on a memory, tenuous and gossamer, of my sister and brother and I playing communion on the Louisiana bayou behind Granny’s house, the body the mud, the water full of silt, our congregation an invisible throng of the hopeful and needy, the broken and vulnerable.
When I fell into the tunnel of unknowing, you hushed me as hands pushed me into a vat of milk and blood. Why do I follow you beyond all reason? Why do I lose myself and prefer instead that I become an object in your eyes, something to be made?
At sunset, she walks the beach hushing a nonexistent infant in her arms. But no one else has seen her, only me. They say I imagine her, dead and barren in my longing.