Wrist Assessment - Flash Fiction

 

 




The perfumer sprays her scent on to her own wrist and then offers it to the man to incline towards her in order to inhale its bouquet. He only smells the aroma of the rest of her. 

Leather straps had always rotted away in time, so he had opted for the segmented metal strips to cincture his modish watch. When he removed it at the end of the day, he liked the inhuman indentations left in his skin, like an insect’s thorax, or a barcode. 

The man shot his cuffs with great deliberation. The aurora of his diamond encrusted cufflinks twinkled before their eclipse beneath the jacket’s sleeves. She was attracted to them as to the eye spots of a butterfly which draws down a predator into the miasma of confusion.

The man slammed against a wire mesh fence cutting off his escape. He beat it in despair before turning and offering his forearms for the cops to cuff. They whipped him round and bound him behind his back, spurning his supplication.

The man brought his wrists together perpendicularly, making the sign of the cross to ward off the invisible tormentors who were whispering in his ear. In his agitation, he rubbed them together like sticks, as if trying to ignite and purge himself.

The woman studied the veins in her pallid wrist. As her finger traced the filaments, she felt like she had been knitted together in yarns of blues and reds. Only somewhere along the journey she had misplaced the knit pattern.

Having scanned the room for the invigilator, the girl surreptitiously eased her blazer’s sleeve down and consulted the cheat notes she had inscribed on her wrist. Sweat had made the ink run. 

The woman raised her arm to her mouth as if to wipe away some mote, or bite off some frayed strand on her cuff, but as her jaw muscles jagged behind her half-baked occlusion, she was fooling no-one. She was conversing with her unseen controllers.

She had nails and bloodied stigmata tattooed on to the underside of both wrists. She was still awaiting her Mary Magdalene to come tenderly bathe her wounds, though there seemed legionnaires aplenty ready to skewer her with their long-stemmed spears. 

She inverted the knife so that the blunt edge was against her skin and moved it up and down the length of her wrists. The blade chafed harshly against the scarred levees of previous communions between the two.


Taken from "Extra-Curricular, Tales Told Out Of School" 45 flash fiction stories available in print and e-book from Amazon & I-Tunes

Urban Renewal Cubed - Friday Flash

A panoramic eyesore. A blot not just on, but which wholly constituted the landscape, blotting out all sunlight behind its monstrous compass. This housing estate a prototypical design for living back in its proud flesh heyday, garnering architectural prizes. Yet for those denizens forced to dwell there, it represented nothing but a suppurating sore of violence, degradation and stunted horizons.

Nonetheless, today it was coming down. Walls purged of graffiti, in order to have 'marked for demolition' daubed on them instead. Raised by geometrically theoretical architects without reference to the asymmetries of human life, now their grandiosely rash vision was being razed to the ground. The final Euclidean lines, being those as the dynamite blasted the buildings plumbline straight in an elegant curtsy.

However the residents weren't being returned their lives. Having inhabited this area their entire existence pre the pre-fabrication, as well as during it, now they were to be further-flung. More atomised than the levelled bricks and steel.

Over the settling mounds of rubble, the pallid sun emerged from its thirty years of eclipse. The wind no longer had the stilts to whistle through like a bowling alley and skittle any human pedestrians. Earmarked for reconstruction, the site would first have to be cleared of debris, the guilty town planners surveyed about their gross failings. But neither took place. The city fathers' coffers had run dry of money to redevelop anything, while the master builders had hightailed their way into academic tenure. Lecturing the next generation of urban blighters, while sat in oak-panelled Medieval collegial towers.

*

The city's antiquity had taken away visitors' breath for centuries. Approached from the hills, the vista opened up into the spangling splendour of its domes, spires and minarets. Yet the stucco had plastered over the cracks. Frozen enmities glazed behind the friezes. Grudges moulded over the centuries now hard set into the cornicing.

Some of the houses had still borne the stigmata of a painted red cross to indicate Gothic plague. Well now all the houses bled with the pestilence brought down on everyone's heads. Furious fusillades of neighbour against neighbour.

Since the mosaic of races had started to unravel. The hand-woven gaily coloured welcome mats, no longer adorned domicile entrances. Only piles of sandbags instead. Once harmonious pediments, pockmarked through the impedimenta of military ordnance, triangulated through their cross-haired sights up in the hills. The picaresque daubed facades now pebble-dashed by shrapnel. Bricks and mortar torn up by Realpolitik's mortars raining fire.

Brightly coloured houses were gouged by the scorched carbon trails of shells. Rendered further drab by blackout drapes, tarpaulin and camouflage netting between the husks of houses, likely secreting a gun emplacement. The miscegenated colours of the city's terracotta and slate, now uniformly turned sombre olive or grey. Telescopic theodolites surveying for urban clearing, by way of ethnic cleansing. The clot that never heals.

*

He sat on the window sill staring up at the wan disc of the sun. It had yet to burn through the clouds, so flattening it against their filmy shroud. The moment it did so, he risked the sun also burning through his retinas. He thought he might rather welcome that.

Resembling little more than a stage lighting gel, he tried hard to imagine the sun as a seething ball of nuclear fusion. Nothing but brute raw power, smashing of atoms and remaking matter into energy. He speculated on the sound all that elemental pounding would forge. His own fire roared as it burned its pipe-fed gas in a humble Newtonian and Charles' manner. Yet such rumbling was outmuscled by the hiss of the gas valve releasing it into the duct.

But then he recalled that there was no air out in space. That it therefore lacked for a medium for the sound to be carried. The light energy from the sun could pass unhindered, yet the energy converted into sound died on solar lips. Much like the voice of god.

The creeping advance of the light had woken the birds. Their aubade broke out across the trees. Flowering and nourished under the sun's tentacular reach. A programmed growth and an instinctual repertoire of song. An adaptive symbiosis between bird and tree. Light the conjuror summoning striking everything into life.

He sensed that the sun was growing stronger, its orange hue intensifying. He closed his eyes, but a corona was still imprinted on his retinas in an after-image. Like scar tissue. With his eyes still rammed shut, he rubbed the skin over his forearm. It was bumpy and welted from when he had sat here before and simply driven his arm out through the window glass, gashing it sufficiently to engulf the feelings swirling around inside his head. Trying to attain the zenith of touch, to promote it to the perigee of his constellated senses.

The blood transfusions he'd required to prop him alive. Somebody else's pith and plasma coursing through him, yet he felt nothing different from before. The delightful tug of the synthetic thread of  the stitches long gone now. Something not him intimately welded to his skin, until they dropped away. Then there was the plaster cast set in place to thwart his wanton unpicking, to let the ravaged tissue heal. A protection from himself. His so-called loved ones had adorned his false cast with their signatures. Peeled off and disposed of when the cast came off. But they'd had the last laugh when he came home from his hospital sojourn and found that his mother had organised for the broken glass to be replaced. Didn't they understand that he was engaged in trying to alter his very own fabric? Yet they persevered in the notion that the house and every other surface appearance was to be restored to familiarity. When all he wanted was to forge a new seam.

He'd garnered some satisfaction from the wound's raised fibrous gnarl. And still he picked at it remorselessly. Piquing the baby pink keloidal skin. He was desperate to override its code. His code, that DNA programme which recloned him time after time. He yearned to cast himself anew. Even if only this tiny portion of his arm. If successful, there would be other vitreous panes and glass shards to recontour his body. The gorgeous scar tissue that reverberated constantly under his sleeve. That fired his nerves and suggested that he was alive. With touch finally at the apex of the hierarchy of sensation. Eclipsing the light. The sound of nuclear fusion in his ears from across the void.

Death Masking Love - Friday Flash

To mark the kindle publication of my collection of flash fiction "52FF", I've reproduced one from the book and which appeared in #fridayflash in December 2010.

She brought the end of her fingers to her mouth and moistened them in her warm saliva. The whorls of her prints glistened in the meagre light of the room. But it wasn't her own outlines she was interested in raising.

His hand lay outstretched in his sleep, palm exposed. She splayed out her fingers so as to graze each pad with his. To seal her contours with his and have them sear into hers. She would not allow that we are each born with our unique stamp woven into our fingertips. The perfect match, that seamless superimposition of one upon the other, must exist. Unfortunately, even in his sleep, his was too broad for her to span with her dainty little hand.

Undaunted, she caressed her index finger downwards and began to trail the creases and wrinkles across his palm. She wasn't a trained chiromancer, yet maintained her own superstitious credo of the significance of the lines. She understood the notions of the heart, the head, the life and fate, each having their own thread. Just she couldn't unravel them to yield the centre of the labyrinth. They refused to give up their runic Braille quite as easily as the digital phrenologists claimed.

Instead the lines offered tiny windows into how sensitively a man used his fingers. Whether the ridges and folds suggested a tendency to a closed fist, a restlessly flexing tension, or a more open-handed receptivity. The portents on this one were good.

Having crisscrossed his hand enough times to make him flinch it reflexively in his sleep, she carried on down the exposed wrist. Veins and arteries picked out against his pale skin. The hair there so fine and blond as to efface itself. Unlike on the reverse side of the forearm, where it flourished like jungle vines. But here, the red and blue lines stood out like a road map. The major trunk routes of pulsing blood and the minor tracks back to the heart. She knew that a wedding band was always on the fourth finger, because people used to believe it to have a vein leading from there all the way to the love muscle itself. With such a mish-mash of venous vermicelli in the wrist, she couldn't be sure how they could have traced it so limpidly. Before the dawn of the anatomists with their scalpels.

There was always something too fragile suggested by the upturned wrist, too vulnerable. So she moved quickly on. She found herself at the elbow and wondered at the change of skin topography. The permanent fold there raised a livid red scale. Yet here was the most symmetrical set of features on the whole skin. There could you witness the cellular architecture of the human body in all its intricacy. Tiny parallelograms, each with a facility to shrivel or stretch, to concertina and overlap their neighbour. The shuffling orchestration was simply divine. She licked the elbow with her tongue in appreciation. It tasted of interrelatedness.

*

When she woke up, he was gone. He hadn't even extinguished the overhead light, even though it was morning and ribbons of light were streaming through the blinds. Lashing her to the sheets. Seemed like they weren't such a good fit after all.

She stared at the indentations left in his pillow. The case rucked where it had cradled his head, bearing the sunken contours from the downward pressure. More wrinkles and creases, only this time turned inside out. Lacking for the supporting body they served. The vacated lines, the abandoned seams, having opened the quarry of her own body the night before. The death mask of another potential relationship, pressed down with airless finality.

Once, just once, she yearned to wake up and find the smooth impression of a fully-drawn face still lying on the pillow next to hers. Not having to commit the features to her wistful memory, but to be able to revisit them afresh everyday, in the flesh.

Sink Or Skin? - Friday Flash

The skin and bone skinflint wasn't too skint to buy some skinflicks and some skunk to skin up, some heroin to skin pop and enough drink for a skinful. Skinny-dipping in a sinful sink-hole.

Persistent sinking of some of his sink-fund currency into the sinkhole of his sunken and shrunken rectitude, his addictions now had him hooked line and sinker, but he was too far sunk to possess a sinking feeling nor sink through the floor.

Four skinheads in their skintight Sta-Pressed and inked skin art, who only ever went skin deep in their prejudices, perennially looking to skin you alive with their oxblood boots and skin peelers. But he was able to duck into a skin bar and escape these snickering skinflaps by the skin of his teeth, leaving him with a skinny lip, skin abrasions and flesh nicks. Some skinny malinky skank was flashing her skinflowers at him and he felt his own skinflute tooting. He felt a rising urge to sink his sausage, but when he went to his skin-hugging pocket, only to find his sunken treasure hoard had sunk without trace.

Sink the Bismarck sunk.