A faerie ring of discarded cigarette ends.
A henge of jagged bottles sawn off by practise bullets. Witches’ thimbles picked out in empty shell casings.
Wreaths woven not from acorns and oak leaves, but from silver foil and torn up aluminium can crack pipes.
A cromlech constructed from three abandoned shopping trollies.
Corn dollies festooned the bare ground, fabricated from condoms and tampons.
Hag stones cultivated from car tyres, corn circles of six-pack beer plastic.
A spineless scarecrow featurelessly fashioned from a mound of clothes and rags.
A small maypole erected from a medical crutch planted in the soil while strips of bandages billowed from it.
Devil’s footprints forged from pillboxes, twisted glue tubes and lighter fluid tins.
Where rubbish had been burned, scorched into the grass was a black chalk outline of a prone man shorn of a wicker husk.
The giant ash tree stretching to the heavens had played host as gallows, suspending the lowliest man on earth from its branches.
taken from the new flash fiction collection "Extra-Curricular" out no in print and e-book
taken from the new flash fiction collection "Extra-Curricular" out no in print and e-book
17 comments:
Loved the last line!
Hmm... Good one. Gripping within its few lines making me want to know 'where will it end up?' So - which lowliest man: how many eyes, how many wounds?
Both a sad indictment of our times and a warning for the future too.
eerily apocalyptic, marc! the accumulation is well meted out, builds nicely to the great last line.
I see a modern-day Odin hanging from the world ash, and instead of an eye sacrificed for knowledge, he wears Google Glass.
Jeez, what a horrible place.
hey that's either my neighbourhood or the inside of my mind you're talking about there Steve :-)
I liked the way you used all of the different types of trash.
The whole story is sad, more than sad, but that last line makes it absolutely chilling. Terrific work, as always, Marc!
Quite the vivid imagery!
Like Helen, I too enjoyed the last line. It was some wicked party, that's for certain. It's interesting how they made do with what they had.
You paint a powerfully sad picture with this story. It'll linger ...
Well done -- I agree with Natalie, it's a powerful image that will linger.
This is very urban, simultaneously poetically magical and grotesque. It's a collection of rawness, collision between nature and humanity's gifts in a way of accessorizing it brutally, breaching something. And then the killer last line, attributing to the stillness. Beautiful.
Ooh, nice, Marc. Dystopian mythopoetry subverting the old ideologies. Delish : )
this reminds me of my brain after a long night at the bar, all just a little messed up and abused.
I can think of two physical spaces that would answer this description very well. Funny, they both border areas known as "nice" suburbs. So long as the tall grass obscures the evidence and doesn't let it lower property values, no-one seems to care.
Nicely done.
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