Four-Minute Warning - Flash Fiction

We had got flabby after the withering away of mutually assured nuclear destruction. Replacing the four-minute warning with our own cosy version, the Bucket List. Taking our own sweet time. Indulging presumed pleasures rather than confronting the other pole of the spectrum, the non-continuum, that of our demise. 

When knowledge of the new imminent extinction event broke, the world soon reverted to type. Full panic mode which should have been enough to paralyse us in place in unremitting contemplation of our gathering cessation. But now, pluckily folk sped up their ambitions and deviated off the inventory into far more extreme vistas. Time for a first taste of the blood of another human on the tongue. Or the thrill of totalling automobiles in the stock car race at the end of the world, or the exasperated exhilaration of finally hurling a Molotov Cocktail at the Town Hall. However looting held no appeal, since what was the point of wearing diamonds for just two days, nor would people be needing stockpiles food where they were heading. 

America and other tribal societies opted to pay off old scores and grudges. All except in one locus. Great Britain remained calm. An equipoise not borne of any T-Shirt slogans, or even the reputed stiff upper lip grin and bear it mien. Rather the nation had experienced a previous occasion for playing out of its collected grief, with the death of their Princess of Hearts. That was the circumstance in which they had mourned for their own unfulfilled lives, so that they had nothing left to give a second time when they were directly threatened with expiration. 

Shibboleth - Flash Fiction

He charged five bucks a head. Frat pledgers, his fellow medical students of course, criminology majors who wanted to experience something beyond dry textbook case law and the freaks, voyeurs and pervs and drunks on a dare. Didn’t matter what their motivation, they all behaved so predictably around the cadavers. So unimaginatively. Posed in tableaus non-vivant they credited would demarcate them as animate set against the lifeless. Asking him to snap shots on their phones, you don’t get red eye from the dead that’s how you tell the difference. Though their mouths were smiling, their flesh betrayed them with lines and rucks of tension as against the smooth, unpinched mound of the dead. Emboldened, drunker or lightheaded from the embalming fumes, then they became more outrageous and yet more trite. More base. They started playing with the appendages. Dreary little skits and mockeries of sex. He wanted to charge them an extra five for the privilege but deferred seeing how ramped up they were. He merely issued a plea that these snapshots remain private and never see the light of day. No matter what the degradation heaped upon the corpses, they still bore more dignity than their abusers.

He now a fully qualified doctor of the flesh. Yet he was present as a medical officer not to heal, rather to insure that the ‘correctives’ left no visible sign of injury. He had to advise on when certain instruments and techniques threatened to leave their imprint on skin and how to forestall that. After all even in this secure facility, loose cameraphones could sink ships. But what he hadn’t reckoned on was a reprise of the tableaus from his past. Only this time with still living flesh. And this was not downtime activity, but part of the interrogative process. The torturers recreated mounds of human carrion with the living prisoners and asked him to snapped shots of themselves manhandling the breathing carcasses with the same scorn as those back at school did with the lifeless. He’d say their scenarios were no less vapid and asinine than with the corpses, but this was qualitatively different. This time he would not be charging a viewing fee. And he took the photos that he snapped and leaked them at the first opportunity.

Three Eclipses - Friday Flash

The geisha strummed the three strings of her shamisen for her Samurai master. The instrument's body encased in catskin that held the sweet vibrations like a purr. Its silk strings fashioned of the same material as the kimono in which she was draped. Three ivory pegs chorusing the hairpins shaping her high chignon hair. The three strings rubbed against one another to conjure up the sound of a whole hive of bees. The plectrum caressing against the body to conjure the rhythms of the hooves of her master's horse. Her fingers palpating the frets to make the instrument sound like sweetly dripping honey.

She was his flower in the pleasure quarters and his willow throughout the rest of the house, as she fed his soul with poetry, dance, calligraphy and grace. At night, to preserve her elaborate hair pinned with turtleshell, she slept with her head on a block and a bed of rice around its base to alert her, were her crown to roll off the wood.

Then came the American bomb clouds that momentarily blotted out the sun and stripped all the leaves from the trees. Those birds not in its vicinity, till crashed in their flying, as they conceived night had descended. The bees disappeared. Turtles retreated inside their shells never to resurface from their hibernation.

Now her silk kimono sat uncomfortably. She could feel the silk writhing over her body, as if the worms sought to reclaim their cocoons for their unborn broods. The shimasen's silk strings came away from the catskin body, as they too protested their indenture. Her master took his pitiless steel and rendered Seppuku. His insides unravelling like the insurgent strings on her shamisen. Her tresses escaped their turtleshell grips. No more of flowers and willows. A perpetual winter had eclipsed Japan's ever rising sun.

The silhouette of an American GI stood behind her shoji. He slid the screen door back, his bulk dimming the whole room. Save for the corona of light from the burning tip of his cigarette waxing and waning as he breathed heavily. Try as she might, she couldn't convince herself that it was a firefly in the night attracted by the scent of her hair's pomade.

Taken from the Flash Fiction collection "Long Stories Short" available on Amazon Kindle