Night Vision - Friday Flash

 

He pressed his eye to the thermal imaging camera’s viewfinder and peered into the distance through the flimsy curtains of the house opposite. Satisfied the optic was correctly appointed, he addressed his laptop monitor. Moving blobs of curdled colour. Contour lines of heat seared by the camera’s penetrating photons and thence picked out in pixels on his screen. Stratified clots pulsing and seething, the iridescent masses of two convulsing human beings.

He knew the outline of one of those forms intimately, yet he couldn't discern it from the other at all. They were too amorphous in their shifting stratified chroma. Hotspots (or cold spots) writhed in the centre of the two bodies. Shading into paler at the peripheries. Ectoplasmic as they squirmed and thrashed. Two bloated worms under his microscope. The heart and viscera eclipsed within the dark shades, the flimsy muscle and tendons hollowed out in the lighter complexions. Her dark heart possessed, it was hard to credit it was actually her in the room there.

Light didn’t code for sex, yet here one ranged through all the blue shades of the spectrum, while the other all the reds. Differing wavelengths, Dopplering away one from the other? Yet the two coagulations of colour were certainly proximate to one another. Where discrete fascicles overlay each other, the blue-red didn’t fuse into green. Each preserved its swirling integrity. A curvilinear puce yin and a teal yang. Or vice versa. Was it possible that she was blue with frigidity towards the man in there? Perhaps he was the one callously aloof towards her, but then his own dander raised as he thought of the monster just using her for his own ends. He returned to refocus the camera lens.

He resumed his gaze at the monitor. The heaving shapes looked like agar cultures in a giant square bed of a petri dish. These two bacteria, heaped twin bacillus cultures. Agglomerating. But not reproducing. It was as if another entity was walking through her body, working through it. Emptying it. Slowly eviscerating her. But then the pith hardened and reformed and grew bigger. A burst of passion perhaps, inflating the dark area. The cold-hotspot. He mustn't let his own emotions saturate their respective tints. Adulterating their complexions which otherwise might be far more complementary. The forms looked pregnant with another inside. Pregnant with each other perhaps? Swelling together. No longer possible even to determine dorsal from anterior. An infant’s shapeless painting. No longer human. The beast with two backs. With a single shot he could rupture those chromatic borders, bleed red into blue into red. Dark into light into crowning dark. 

But what if she had been similarly hued within his own embrace? He throbbing volcanic shades of red, her all ice-cool blue of detachment? A crystal sapphire of flinty indifference towards him. He had to know. He had to find out for himself. He had to get inside that house, pull the man off her and take his place. Then he would return here and consult the colour chart for her answer. For her true colours.

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.   

Fairground Attraction

Husband and wife duellists whetting their custom weapons. As usual neither has any Seconds, no one to rein them in and make them see sense. No feud-fatigued child savant to bang their infantile heads together. Ding ding, seconds out, round on one another. Roll up, roll up.

His tongue rolls the acidic spitball around the crevices and cavities of his mouth. Shaping and casting the verbal stilettos. Honing the precise dimensions of the intended words. Filing and grinding against his teeth. Ready to launch and thrust. The palate sheath withdraws, the acuity primed to cut

To the quick, yet not to the core. As in any quarrel, the aim is to wound but not fell. To pin down without impaling. To notch the unimpeachable point of an argument, not to clinch a lifetime of detestation. Delicate balance and distribution of point and edge. He fixes on aiming for that ridiculous kiss curl that mocks him from between her eyes. If he could snag that particular quintain, she would perforce have to tug her forelock and concede. Of course there is so much petrochemical gunk lining her head already, a single loose spark emitted from his cold metal barb...

And she too is firing up her arsenal. Liquid accelerant lapping around her quivering mouth, working up the necessary flammability. To go incendiary on his hind quarters. Arse! This was going to be a big time blow up. Lardy! Quarter neither asked for nor given. And so it begins. Cocktease!/ Cockfeather!

He lashes her to the revolving wheel in his mind's eye. Echoes of historical Inquisitions. When stilled, it facilitates his aim, training his trajectory along sharp lines for honed blades. But when that gash of a mouth of hers has built up sufficient steam, spinning wildly so she becomes nothing but a blur, a whirl of perpetual motion, he is charged with a far more hazardous plunge. She becomes a girandole of complete unreason. Snuffing out all further susceptibility. The pommels of his verbal daggers flapping with cartoon reverberations, having missed their mark. Dabbing uselessly in the air, like the snapped limb of an animal

She has her fire started now. Eternal conflagrations billow from the everlasting brimstone of her forge. Freshly quarried by her blistering tongue, seeking to spit-roast him for quarry. Her fierce heat singes his eyebrows. He hefts another knife to slice through the air at her heart. Cockroach!/ Coward! / Vermin! / Dung beetle!

His salivary salvo is unleashed. Whore! Meets hers head on. Limp dick! His words condense in her heat, vaporised with a tutting hiss of steam. His cutting edge tempered. Temper, temper, you're showing your hand. You got nothing Mr Limp wrist. That quenches him. Brittle now. Well you'd know, you wrote the book on temperamental. With the emphasis on the 'mental'. Temper, a double-edged word. Fit for an outburst, an unhinging of passion such as this. But also a mollifying, a soothing. A middle way.

Blunted, forced back by the heat, he must acknowledge the middle way to be her way for today. From knife thrower to sword-swallower. Forcing him to eat his own words. Falling on his own sword. Maybe not, a final parry possible; Make-up sex? he tentatively proffers.

She glares him down in flames.

Passion's big top blown for another evening.




This story appears in my first Amazon Kindle collection

Click on this for a troubling video of a knife throwing mother...