Threads - Friday Flash

It could go in one of two ways...

He awoke under a thatched roof as the sunlight streamed in through the straw's interstices. Shackles of light pinned him to the floor, a vestigial auspice of the convict's recent status prior to his breakout.

The forensics team built an exact replica of the shoot-out room, die stamping holes through the doors and walls where the bullets had punched into the room's interior. But it was only when they used red thread tracing the trajectories through those holes, that the room took on the appearance of a cats cradle that had raked and clawed the lives of a whole family.

He squeezed the atomiser of the spraycan, sending vapour fanning out until the fine droplets illuminated the infra-red tripwires through the filter of his night-vision goggles. He performed the action repeatedly until he had a mental map of the beams, knowing that his own sinuous movements would have to be as light and airy as that of the hairspray.

The problem with doing your own cornrows is that you can't but help pull the hair tighter away from the scalp, than when someone else was doing it for you. He missed his daughter's supple fingers that used to braid his locks for him and though his arthritic hands could still twist the braids, they were too gnarled and bent to thread the beads.

Having unpacked the six foot of DNA coiled into the cell nucleus, a gob of spit bound like Samson between two pillars, she proceeded to photograph it. Not diffraction images, of building up pictures from absences and lacunae, but actual direct light exposure, she knew would likely bring the whole damn human edifice crashing down on all their heads.

He leaned over his sink and spat blood into it, mottling the white porcelain with red until the water from the tap fretting away at its tensile strength finally overcame its resistance and swept it away towards the plughole. When finally the blood-flow had slowed so that it was just a streak of red spittle stretching down past his chin and on to the folds of his neck like a stalactite, he knew he would be avenged of this insult that same night.

It wasn't his hemophilia that did for him, seeing as the bullet had wrought destruction on too much tissue for even a fully-functioning coagulation cascade to be able to plug with platelets and clots. Lying there clutching his gut with a slow bleed, the fibrinogen chain gangs forging fibrin chains still performed their futile toil, like breaking rocks under the burning scorch of the sun.

The string ballistic trajectories emanating through slits in the surfaces, unwittingly modelled the quantum world in which the act of observation collapsed the wave function and made the bullets seemingly behave with the singularity of solid matter. Therefore the police were never able to fathom other possible behaviour patterns behind the arc of the projectiles.