Pestle And Mortar - Flash Fiction

My mother was a casualty of the war they call life, or life-giving. Sapper me tore her up from inside. Bayonetted trench warfare as I emerged from gerrymandered dimensions of the tunnel complex and out over the top into the light. I detonated into the world. The medics stitched her back together down there, but she was no longer fit for active services to parturition; a pessary to prop up the collapsed sump and berm. Awarded an honourable discharge, with blood clotted me serving as the dishonourable discharge that emerged from her. She wasn’t fit for much in the way of anything. Shellshocked or gassed, it amounted to the same nullity. She regressed in her behaviour even as I advanced. She got down on the floor and played with my sister’s dolls as if they were Action Men. She pulled them out from beneath her skirt pleats like hand grenades and then flung them across the room. I knew they were representations of me and my unwitting violence heaped upon her, unfriendly fire apparently. I enlisted for a permanent tour of Freudian duty, a casualty of war in peacetime as I devoted my unconscious life to reconstructing the fragments of my cluster bomb that had blasted my mother apart. 

Shipbilging - Flash Fiction

The shattered jeroboam’s frothy white squirt against the hull’s continental steel. A dwarfed, ignominious marker of diminished imperial puissance. An overdue premature ejaculation, since there aren’t yet engines fitted into the hulking hollow husk. The remaining shard of the cable-hung bottle, bobbing against the receding keel, as if fumbling to pinion the hasp of a broach.

The metallic monolith slithers down wooden logs into the river. Honouring the glacial pace of retooling, unionised fidelity to the ribs of the antediluvian steel womb it was pressed from. Larger scale male encomium to the frugality of the household mangle. Jagged, homespun industrial Victoriana, in an incipient age of laser torches and robot arms. 

As the vessel breasts the water, kissed not by the Asti-Spume-Mante, rather buffed with the stowaway blood of journeymen workers. Siemens’ seamen involuntarily press-ganged between the metal rollers. Riveters’ skin inadvertently welded into the plates of the ship. Caulked snug to seal seaworthiness with worthless toiling lives. Enfolded like ectopic embryos, immured behind birthing canal alloys. The figurehead prow of old, moving aft. Skeletons and calcified limbs disinterred when the ship is broken down for scrap years hence. Blood dried the same colour as rust. 

Still - Flash Fiction

My child was finally out of me. Yet the convex salience of my belly still bore her cameoed imprint. No phantom amputee this, I did not still feel her to be inside. I was like the snake who had swallowed prey whole and my body accordingly distended around the shape of my ingurgitation. Yet now that digestional absorption was complete, the evacuation passed as scurf, my hide had not recoiled its elasticity to resile me sinuously lithe. And for what? We had both been destroyed by our co-habitation. For my child had been stillborn. She was the phantom amputee.

Tilt - Flash Fiction

Naturally I have no recollection of this, being pre-neuronal and rod and cone focal, but my head shoved through the membraneous flaps of my mother’s mucosal vestibule on its way to inaugural appointment with light, air and future memories.

I tromped through an interior gloom barely illuminated by radioactive decay’s palpating the stencilled phosphorescence of the word ‘Exit’ and pushed through the cinema doors. The screen was so distant from the back of the auditorium it was barely visible, but a cone of light was appointed towards it from the projector and I froze, transfixed by the play of the tiny figures held captive within its beam just above my head.

The restaurant was busy and since my company was uninteresting to me, I settled for watching the waiting staff barrel and weave around tables with trays high above their heads like funambulating jugglers. Whenever they surged through the kitchen’s doors, dangerous stabs of flame briefly fulgurated, before the return swing of the portal eclipsed and re-sheathed them. 

With me supine on a hospital trolley, my porters used the metal frame to ram through the doors and plunge me straight into the harsh glare of the overhead surgical spotlight. My paper gown parted of its own volition with the impact’s vibration shaking it free from my quailing body, my shaking fingers trying to pincer its hem back in place.

The belt began its dolefully sedate rolling towards the shutters, inching the wooden crate along with arthritic solemnity. However any serenity was dissevered by the hiccup motion of the coffin bumping up against the incinerator doors, like a stage actor doffing his hat before taking his final leave and then battering through door and curtain lining. 

I threw my whole body into the two side buttons of the table to distend the flippers to their maximum, yet we were thwarted by the pinball shooting straight down the middle out of reach. I couldn’t even access my two remaining silver orbs since the flashing lights announced ‘Tilt’. 

Lux - Flash Fiction

I have been exposed to the light just the once. The occasion of the expulsion of my birth. Tumbling from the primordial interstitial paradise, into a searing light that sundered the milky membranous veil from my eyes. Reflexively I averted my head and pressed it into the cold breast of my mother who had expired from the moil of evacuating me. Burying my face into her clabbered flesh blotted out the punishing light and stopped up my incipient breath. These twin inundations red-illuminated the arteries behind my own eyes and caused shooting spangles of stars. Another tunnel of light opened up before me, its adit beckoning me into its maw. Light beyond and light within. Fortunately I blacked out until the siege of me was somehow lifted by the midwives.

Since then I have only ever shunned the light. Reverse heliotrope. Abetted by the pollution in the air that strains the sunlight and turns it caliginous. Some say such fetid air reeked of brimstone, but such a notion struck me as fanciful though it enfettered me in my daily wake. Abroad at night, the reflected and depleted light of the moon pierced me no threat. While the spill of the gaseous orange glow of the street lamps served to smear and blanch the twinkling of the stars. I just had to ensure I kept my head down so as not to stare into the coronas generated by the bulbs. I had my catapult in my pocket were any street lamp to shine too brightly, but even that I knew was a harbinger of its imminent death as the filament teetered on the point of burning itself out. Light does that, it consumes itself bloodily.

So I inhabit the shadows and the gloom. I bask in the Cimmerian. It puts me proximate with other tenebrous brokers and stewards of the night. These creatures with reptilian eyes. Yet when they look into mine unshrouded by any lids, they misconstrue my gaze as unflinching and steadfastly abysmal. A trick of the, well light. Or lack of it. But the opacity of my gaze is sufficiently indurate for them to pledge me adamantine fealty. 

Nevertheless I am not one of their cohort. I promise them nothing, reward them less. Still they seek my sanction for their wicked acts. They propitiate what they imagine must be my appetite for blood. They see me vampire, when in fact I am more humble angel. 

Nor can I abide the fires they light to warm themselves, for there coruscates an accelerated energy giving rise to sharp stabs of light. Fulgurant embers rise into the air as an unsympathetic echo of the spangles which stamped my newborn vision. So when I am accused of presiding over a realm of persecutory flames, I shrug my wings in refutation. They dub me "Lucifer", the son of dawn, bringer of light. Have they failed to notice that I am usually long-gone before Helios has mounted his chariot?