The Gathering - Friday Flash

No one at this party sported name badges. More’s the pity. They all appeared tightly bonded, hierarchically indentured, Jacob's social ladder to employment heaven, though with all feet firmly planted on the ground. Me, I felt adrift amongst the tide, these children of the Promised Land where I am the lone one of Pharaoh’s cavaliers not swept up in the swirling waters of the Red Sea. Amidst these entrepreneurial elect, I feel I have drowned anyway. I would rather once again cross the Red Sea than cross the floor of this room. 

So who do I make for? Which one of these cynosures of the chosen people holds my fate in his hands? One of them possesses the arcanum that will unlock my future. Could it be him, with the burst blood vessels in his nose, surely he is too much yoked to the fruit of the vine to be entrusted with such salutary wisdom? Or how about him, though to hear him pontificate he appears as mad as a plague of frogs? This third has no morals as his financial locusts descend on an enterprise and asset strip every last spike clean. While the chap next to him I see wincing and shrinking, presumably as a farmer who suffered at the likes of just one such at his hands. Though his uncallused digits suggest his loss was less of reaped wheat and more of murrained livestock. I feel his pain, not of his absented herds and flocks, but as to how he can best remove himself from this social cartel. How to shuffle and sidle away without appearing peremptorily impolite. The trick being to seem endlessly hanging on every word of the pack alpha so that you curry flavoursome favour. A clarified buttering up of the Pharoah who grants such favours, morsels from the top table. Top tips tantalisingly hovering just at the extremes of range of your fingertips. Don’t reach too importunately for the parings or the bait will be pulled away, for what can I but offer him in return? The Prisoner’s Dilemma pertains here. I don’t know the pecking order, whether I am asking for too much or too little. Whether it is even in the grant of this potentate or another. For none bear the mark of the Paschal to enable me to effortlessly passover them. But then it’s hard to credit that any of them could be lambs at all. A plague on the rest of them’s houses.

But who am I to be so exacting on those in the room? They may display the ten pestilences of Exodus, but I embody the deadly sins of the hindmost Testament. The venal weaknesses of my own anxieties. Sloth, need one say more? I am not so much out of practise at networking as virginal. I envy the sleek, slick professionalism of all here, even as I vaingloriously congratulate myself for remaining unsullied by their materially tainted mores and jealously resolve to preserve my own imagined purity. I know my vulnerability, that if I expose myself to the magnetism of these semi-divinities, I hazard unbuckling my lust and falling wholly under their orbit. And avarice and gluttony? This is where I lose my confidence since such features are the preserve of my interlocutors and circumnavigators in the room. As Old merges and acquiesces into New, a hostile takeover. Sins and plagues blend immaculate and smear us all. 

Parsing Fantasy - Friday Flash

At first I thought you might be casing the joint. But returning day after day after day, I realised you were studying me. What could you possibly want with me? What in my life, my being, is of such interest that you devote all this attention to me? Don’t you have a life of your own? Patently not if you can waste this amount of time rubbernecking. 

What do you imagine observing my actions through the window pane? It must be like watching a mime show? Or the frustration of witnessing someone else on the telephone, hearing their responses but not those of their inquisitor down the line? I’ve no idea what your bag is, dogging my every move. I won’t yield you whatever it is you’re after. Not that I actually merit any such scrutiny. You must have noticed that I lead an utterly unremarkable life.

I know you’re there. I’ve caught glimpses of movement in my peripheral vision. When I’m stood at my sink washing up, I see flashes of you reflected in the glass. You constantly walk through my mind. Trespassing. Leaving your trail. The spoor of you. The same as you do outside. The lawn grass trodden down, although there is no footprint. Each time I hear the leaves rustle, but there isn’t any wind. That confoundedly perennial clicking. You probably know my name, while I don’t know yours, but I shall christen you ‘Russell’. Since that is the sound I associate with your presence. That and your susurrations. I honestly believe I hear you licking your lips. But you’d have to be virtually stood with your mouth pressed to my ear for me to hear that.

No matter how careful you are, you’ll end up revealing yourself to me. Funny, I have no idea what you look like, yet I have a highly developed mental image of you. I may not know your exact motives, but your character’s coming through loud and clear to me. For all your surveying of me, I reckon I know more about you than you do about me. Not that I want to. Just you are more transparent than me. And I aim to maintain my opacity to you.

The chair’s moved! Infinitesimally but it’s definitely moved off its spot. You’ve been in here haven’t you? Sat there at my table, while I was out. Availing yourself of my, well I’m not sure quite what. But you took up an invitation that was never made to you. It’s all a fantasy in your head. Whatever you conceive of me, I am a figment of your imagination, even if unfortunately you are not one in mine. 

So you’ve been in here, had a good look around. Sniffed the air and then the surfaces. You’ve clocked my clothes. Had a nosey in my bathroom medicine cabinet. I bet you scoured the plughole for stray hairs. If you were a policeman you’d be collecting evidence on me. But you’re on the other side of the law, so you’re probably using it to make a voodoo doll impression of me. Well you don’t require any poppet. Your mere presence acts as a needle jabbed into my flesh. I will not cede you any part of me. Not a single piece. You’ve got me collecting up all my parings and offcuts. So they don’t come into your possession. Your fixation can’t be anything based on desire. Since I look an absolute fright. Though I suppose you might celebrate that. The effect you’ve visited on me.

You are little more than a shadow, yet you loom outsized in my imagination. You supposedly have no dimensionality, yet as I shrink and wither under your creeping assault, it is I who lack dimension and you appear to inhabit everything everywhere. My flights of fancy run amok. I dream up way more terrifying persecutions than you could ever inflict on me. Your sickness has infected me, made me take leave of my senses.

Time to shut the curtains on you. Regular as clockwork. A creature of habit. You I mean, not me. I really need a blackout lining sewn into them. Instead of this flimsy tiffany. Anyone could look straight through them and into the heart of this room. Veiling nothing, actually only helping frame everything I do in here. Making me utterly conspicuous for anyone who chooses to gaze in. Like you. Yet no one else seemingly feels the compunction to do it. You force me to sit in the dark with the lights off. But then the colours from the TV screen wash the room and floodlights me further for you. So now I don’t even watch TV anymore. Instead your shadow dances across the blank screen. Maybe I’ll get wooden shutters fitted, a good solid wooden block on you.

What goes on in that head of yours? No you know something, I shouldn’t ask. Or speculate. After all you know nothing about what goes on in my head. And that’s just the way I want to keep it. So the corollary is I inquire or know nothing about you. Seems a fair and reasonable non-exchange. Only there’s nothing fair about this whatsoever. The power is completely lopsided. I’ve changed absolutely everything about my daily routine. Not just to throw you off the scent, but also as I try and work out what it is about me that you’re pursuing. I’ve broken down every facet of my behaviour. I’ve made lists. And then set fire to them. To stop them falling into your hands. 

You think you make me march to your tune. Like some marionette you control and manipulate. But in reality you’re a lousy puppet master. You got me all snagged. Snared in my own lines so I can hardly move. So snarled I can’t dance for you. I won’t dance for you. I barely make it out from my bed anymore. No, damn, I don’t want you to be aware of that. But you probably know already don’t you? 

You’ve made me install a whole battery of detection devices. Motion sensors and lights. Alarms and tripwires. Closed circuit cameras to close off my house to you. In order to capture any perturbation at all. All to catch you in the act of watching. I may not be able to look you in the eye and face up to you, but all these lenses here can do it on my behalf. While you track every one of my movements, my devices only need to freeze a single one of yours. Get you put behind bars where your goose will be cooked. Roasted in the red glow of my laser cameras.

The triplights constantly illuminating my house like a Christmas tree. Shining a light on to every aspect of my life for you. Having me up and down at every beam like a jack-in-the box. My face lit up in the rays as I pulled back the curtain to see if it was you. Putting myself in the spotlight. In your crosshairs and marked the ‘X’ for you. No not a spotlight, a flaming strobelight. Freezing me in place. Sending me into convulsions. I disconnected the contraptions inside the rooms. Ripped the cabling from their sockets. The wiring is still exposed, drooping from the brackets like jungle tendrils and creepers. Like snakes. The disorder of my formerly orderly house. Of my life. I’m sure you’ve monitored the change. Made full mental note. Recorded in your stalker log. Every time I look up at the ceiling now, I encounter how tangled my mind is. And how you the predator lies in wait above.

Finally a clue in which you announced yourself. You committed your thoughts about me on paper. Well virtually. On a book review site. Not a very flattering impression. And then I realise why you have been stationed in my life, trespassing inside my head. Your sickness means you are so deluded as to regard me as a fictional character constructed from words rather than flesh. That anything you do to me has no effect because it’s not real. I’ll get an injunction. A restraining order against you. Set a precedent. The book which bans readers.

One-Eyed Queen - Friday Flash

The first time I clapped eyes on her was discomfiting. Not from the very outset, when our gazes ranging across the party intersected and locked on to each other's visages. We were both wallflowering the florid wallpaper at opposite ends of the room. Me playing it cool, my shoulder blades braced against the wall, my arms crossed in a challenging rebuke to the inelegant entertainment on show. She stood at an angle, her slender bare arm raised against the wall like a flying buttress. Her fingers were tapping time, but not to the crass rhythms tripping up those drunkenly essaying to trip the light fantastic. More as if she was palpating the skin of fruit overhead on a tree. Anguine coiled around Eden's bounty. Her stance was infinitely more insolent than mine and I was smitten.

So I sashayed as sardonically across the shag dancefloor as I could muster, until I was resting my own arm against the wall above my head. She tilted her face to inspect me down the length of her nose. It struck me as a scornful manoeuvre, so in order to regain the upper hand I pertly laid the pad of my thumb under her chin and hoisted it so our eyes were level. I stared long but not very deep. Or possibly vice versa, since I was completely thrown by what I was confronted with.

At first I couldn't figure out what I was looking at. Her eyes certainly weren't both focused on me, whereas mine were acutely lasering themselves trying to come to rest in the depths of hers. But the vertigo induced was not from any boundless infinity. She seemed to refuse to hold my gaze and that only dragged me in further. And then I fathomed it. She had a false eye. Only one of the pair was able to swivel and pivot and track my own boring deeply towards her. She just nodded at my realisation, my thumb still cupping her chin as if it were her spindle, so that her chin bevelling down finagled my digit into the small of her throat, bringing the rest of my fingers brushing up against her lips. Now I was the one inclining my head, trying to pierce her intent. Her tongue told me soundlessly, when it lapped at my fingers.

That first night back at her place we didn't have sex. We talked, we probed, we perlustrated the miniature shrunken images of ourselves in the pupil(s) of the other. Seeking after the secrets of one another's souls. A mite tricky in my case, since her eyes offered two divergent views. One dancing, sparkling with life and a daring ardour. The other icily cool and dumbly reflective. Or so I thought.

When she established to her satisfaction that I was neither freakishly nor fetishly attracted to her strange mien, or that I imagined I could somehow aver myself superior to her, she allowed me into her heart and her bed. We held one another while she unburdened herself of the story how she had come to lose an eye, in a somewhat Biblical pronouncement of justice by an ex-lover. I steeled myself against shuddering at the graphic detail, but could see why she was so careful to vet my reactions prior to this unveiling.

Making love to her was unique. I was transfixed by the coruscations in that glass eye that did suddenly come alive and ignite. As her good eye rapidly blinked and the iris rolled back into its sheathing, the glass eye took on the appearance of a snowglobe as its purview filled with tiny fluttering motes. Changing my focal plain by looming up closer into her face for a kiss, I saw these motes were like butterflies. Like thousands of butterflies taking to the wing after emerging from their chrysalis. The scene there was beauteous, if indeed I could call it a 'scene'. But I was transported away into its cupidity that's for sure.

As we drove deeper into each other's unfamiliarity, her eye changed its outlook. Now it was foggier, like the molten viscosity of a lava lamp. Slow, languid movements. Serpentine, sinuous curlicues of spangling light lay within. I quickly gazed at the rest of her face. Every feature, including her envisioning eye, had receded behind a gauzy insensibility. Everything was focused, directed by her glass eye. It pulsed and respired for her densely layered carnality. And I got sucked right in. I hoisted myself up yet closer and my tongue lapped at the glass orb. I wanted to drink her in. Coat and smear myself in her unquenchable sensuousness. I no longer wanted her to be contained behind glass. She flared up alright.

Her seeing eye probably hurtled to the front of its socket. But the fearsome change was within the vitreous one. The soft billowing velvet nebulae bucked and reared. Terrible tsunamis clawed at the glass' meniscus and turned the deepest shade of red. The waves flung themselves away from the van of the glass and I suddenly saw a plethora of tiny globes enflame and plummeting like fireballs. I regarded lava eruptions and planetary conflagrations before me. And I was terrified. I shut my own peepers in order to eclipse the seething convulsions. Nonetheless I couldn't help but wink one eye part back open in order to witness her raging passion. But I knew I could never match the omnispectivity of my one-eyed queen.

from the flash collection - available from Amazon Kindle Store free to download from 3-7th June 2016

This was the earworm I had which inspired this story. It's amazing the synchronicities that lead to the creative process. Why this particular song buzzing around my head at this particular juncture and why now so that it prompted the idea of this story? I'd known the song for an age, why hadn't it prompted the idea way back then? Presumably I was receptive to writing a story about love and ardour and power this week, though I wasn't aware of a burning need to write such a story. Which came first, the song or the mood of the story that wanted to be written? I have no idea. Inexplicable how it all comes together.