"Tells" - Flash Fiction

The stakes were modest but the competitiveness was voracious. Four studs soldered around the poker table. Unfurling game face masks, over the socialised visors they already sported. But they were always breached by the show and tells of involuntary tics and pigmentations, that flushed their true subjectivities from beneath. Emotional striations on the scratching post of masculinity.  

First was Donnie, sporting sunglasses indoors to conceal his eye twitch, but who was habitually betrayed by all the other facial muscles which remained unveiled; genuflecting wrinkles; quivering dimples; the inward pursing of lips for a dud hand; and puckered for a half-decent one. Then there was Todd, begloved in order to cloak his excitable eczema, but only providing a secondary membrane for when his fingers drummed on the table at two differing syncopations, congruous to the anticipated satisfaction prompted by the cards. Nor could the gloves save him, from the stress reveal of the increasing tightening of his knuckles, by which he found it increasingly difficult to grip and fan his cards as the night wore on. As for Carlos, his whole body was his tell. Slumping back in his chair with despair; or lurching forward to compulsively stack his chips from ziggurat to minaret and back again. Babel tower invocations to the divine, to send him the succubus-muse of Lady Luck. 

Finally, there was Donnie, whose tells had nothing to do with the cards he held. He sniffed uncontrollably, though unnoticed by him, as the cards were being shuffled and the antes tossed in; while the pockets were being dealt; during the flop and the fold; all the way through to the raking of the pot. But his most blatant tell, was the outsized diameter of his permanently flared nostrils. Scarfskin gouged by corrosive chemical powders, while all manner of impromptu conduits, cannulas and flues further furrowed the flesh. Naturally, each could read the tells of the others arrayed around the table, but kept that knowledge pressed into their chests, no less unflinchingly than their hands of cards.

Hard Time - Friday Flash

Lights out.

Stipulated sleep. Designated dormancy. Medicated soporifics.

No longer able to see your fist in front of a whipping boy's punchbag face. No warning glint off the barrel of an improvised shank.

Yet there is plenty defiance of circumscription and the circadian all around. Both conscious and unconscious.

Calloused hands cradle listless cocks, in order to foment some warm milk to carry them over into languor. The darkness matches their own played out inner visions.

Denied both sun and dial, junky horologists listen to the whirring of their body's broken cogs. Trying to calibrate for their midnight feast. The nodding gateway into the land of nod.

Even among those who have succumbed to bromidic conformity, an ease of repose is far from reached. Cavernous shouts gouged from deep within sleep. Sonorous screams wrung from nightmares. Moans rent from all sorts of involuntary persecutions. One-sided catechisms with demons and incubi (a distinct lack of succubi for this benighted company. Least of all the spectres of those women they rendered into ghosts by gun or fleshy garrote).

The most serene may in fact be the psychopaths evenly poised in the slumber of both the just and the unjust. Or those schizophrenics restful in their dreamscapes, where any extraneous voices blend in unobtrusively.

Those superficially at peace, still subconsciously suck their thumbs. Reach out for their mothers in their stupor. These hardened men, off guard and off the clock. For eight hours they can sleep secure that they don't have to plant their backs anywhere more unforgiving than a lumpy mattress. That these eclipsed of society, at least for the duration of the moon's lazy eyed winking around the earth, can rest easy from the indignity of being preyed upon by one of their own kind.

Except me. For I am a nocturnal animal. I need to be abroad when it's dark. Rather than a caged tiger. My keen senses itching for some external movement to latch on to. To snuff out and extinguish. Mentally I pace my cell from the confinement of my bed. I do have a cell mate snoring in the bunk above me. Gulping insufflation of his nightly dose of guilt; absolved with his glottal expulsion. Movement of a sort.

Only I determine when the lights go out.