Hollow Point - Friday Flash

At the end of the tour they hit the gift shop. Her sightseeing hands explored blindly as she fingered the hanging trinkets and pendulous bagatelles. She rattled the wares as if divining for her elect through rhythm and resonance. And then she came upon the carousel of choice. Key-rings with die-stamped Christian names. “Five more minutes” her mother advised. She plumped straight to the tier with names beginning with the letter that initialled her own. She foraged through the rack but without locating her own cognomen. Nothing even close. Curse her parents for their impossible fancy for the foreign and the unfamiliar, yielding the exotic denomination they had conferred upon her. The locus for their dreams and hopes. She knew it was not long after her birth, that a prescriptive list of permissible names for babies had been drawn up and instituted into law. The registry offices would refuse to notarise any identification not on that list. Forlornly she started through other prefixing letters, in case her name had been misfiled. But when her mother yanked her hand to pull her towards home, she barely resisted for she knew her name had not been mislaid in the array. She was destined forever to be misplaced and unrecognised through the singular irregularity of her title.

A brown manilla envelope plopped through the letterbox and landed on the floor with a shrill reverberation. Since her grandmother had confined herself to her bed through unending grief, she stooped to pick it up. Something in the envelope shifted and clinked inside. She brought the package into her grandmother’s darkened room. As she proffered it in the direction of her grandmother, a hand shot out of the bedclothes and waved the envelope away. She retreated back to the doorway. She examined the typed label with the family name and correct address. She worked the sealed flap open and was met with the sight of a folded piece of paper hard up against the rear of the envelope. She removed it and opened it up to reveal a heading marked ‘INVOICE’. It was addressed or chargeable to her Granny saying ‘Expenses incurred (see enclosed contents) x3,  = 34,000 Pesos’. ‘Cost of burials at expense of the State x3, = 200,000 Pesos.’

She canted the envelope to spill its contents into the palm of her hand. Three bullets shook out. She gingerly picked on up between the pads of her fingers, as if somehow it could still discharge itself even without the accelerated access to barreling. It had something etched into its body. It was the name of her mother. Aghast she quickly referenced the second bullet, which bore the legend of her father’s name. She dropped it in her anguish, as if it really had discharged itself. She plucked out the third bullet still ensconced in the corner of the envelope. It had a name which bore some of the letters in that of her own, but not all of them. Nameless, rootless and stateless, her parents’ glamorous dreams of abroad had become her living nightmare here at home.

Taken form the Flash Fiction collection "Extra-Curricular" out now on in print or Kindle and I-Tunes

Bedroom Ballistics

She whipped out the automatic and pressed its muzzle into his belly. In her fury she envisioned his flabby gut enveloping the gun and absorbing it into its mass. Her professional override clicked in and offered V²/(2xS) instead. The bullet’s kiss off would likely be smothered not by his bulk, but by his proximity. The projectile would not possess enough time to accelerate from the subsonic to supersonic velocity in order to wreak its trauma. Limited acceleration, limited damage according to F=MxV². Fortunately his reflexive backing away helped unblock that particular stricture. Recoil ushers in recoil, as her countenance shot him a rictus smile with the unassailable truth of KE (Kinetic Energy) = ½mv² 

His palms were splayed out in front of him in the timeworn gesture of soothing. Dampening down. Importuning her to take it easy. With the triangulation of her, him and the gun, she plotted whether the upraised palms were protecting some vital part of his body. Not that it would matter, she could shoot him through the hand and it will still likely carry on to penetrate his vitals. VRt = VR Cos r.

His hands would only serve as crosshairs for her as he continued his backing away. Zeroing her in on his nether regions. Or never seen regions in the fat lump. Again he was unwittingly doing her a favour. She pictured the projectile scything through his imploring fingers. Those duplicitous fingers that had plied and kneaded the flesh of another woman. The fingers had strayed, could the flesh and bone now deflect the unerring reproach of her snub-nosed love letter? Did he imagine himself to be some sort of super-hero? He was about as far removed from one as you could get. As witnessed by his unheroic continued retreating. 

That was the thing about living a double life. You were still only possessed of a single body. Quantum mechanics EΨ ≠ HΨ be damned. Well might he continue to paw at me at night, but she could tell that it was desultory. Cursory. That his appetites had already been sated elsewhere and there was no real hunger behind the dead pressure on her breast or neck. She could see through his charade. And soon after the bullets do as bullets do, she would be able to see through his body too.

He was still backing away. She wondered how far he’d have to retreat before he was out of range. From the gun if not her yet more searing wrath. Actually it was no wonder at all. Simple precession equation, with little in the way of temperature or atmospheric pressure fluctuation to account for. Ergo R = vo√(2h/g). Course their house wasn’t large enough for him to escape the range of the bullet. Even though he’d almost reached the stairs now. 

She opted to close the gap once again and started advancing upon him. Normally he could easily outstride her as when they walked together out in the street, how that should have been a warning as to how much of a mismatch they were. But here he was walking backwards, plus going down the stairs, while some of his momentum was also diverted into the downward thrust of his hands still gesturing her like a lion tamer ∫ = Fdt.

She caught up to him double quick and this time she pushed the barrel of the gun into his cheek. She marvelled at the displacement of flesh as the barrel bevelled into his skin according to σ = C:ε. Was this how her flesh rucked and ridged under his leaden touch? When he customarily pinched her lips shut. Actually no, she surmised more applicable might be R: = ∇ x F  = 0. Mind you if she kept increasing the pressure of the barrel against his flesh, it becomes R: = ∇ x (∇ x ε). Infinitesimal strain theory, never was something so aptly named. 

*

“There, that sufficiently spice things up for you?”

“Yeah, yeah it did Babe. In parts”.

“Parts?”

“Yeah, there were stages where I could tell you were really feeling it. Etched right across your fizzog, so that you had me believe you might even go ahead and pull the damn trigger... But then, there were also those points where that pretty brow of yours pursed and furrowed and I could see how you were struggling to disengage that planet sized brain of yours from dragging you out of the moment by overthinking it-”

FD = ½ρv² CDA

Taken from the flash fiction collection "Extra-Curricular" available in print and e-book from Amazon, CreateSpace and I-Tunes

Human Viscosity - A Short Tale about Human Fluid Dynamics

(This is a densely written story about density. It's left open as to its interpretation, but some may find this study of human fluid dynamics a tad unsettling, so this is a content warning. Of sorts)

Oil slicked the inner thighs. A sleek insulation coating the skin. Dampening all subsidiary neural agitation amid its cloying diffusion.

The basted skin’s temperature began to rise. The glaze slowly began evaporating as it was warmed from beneath.

But the grease also served to adhere the tissue to the abrasive material of the bare mattress, as it gently tugged the hairs and skin into its coarse embrace. Such suctioning choked the swaddled suspension of sensation, returning the body to an awareness of its proneness.

The fumes of the unguent engulfed the olfactory system. The brain was firing frenziedly as the liquid slither leavened the weight of the body where it was in contact with the mattress, while the unrestricted flesh was surfeited beneath the clamp of the dense liquid.

The oil was continuing to cede the surface, as it either seeped in through the pores in the epidermis, or percolated the mattress where the leg abutted the fabric. Goosepimple promontories rose to signal the balefire of a tremulous chill invading the body in its wake.

With the unctuous cladding duly degraded, the body’s water table was on the rise once again. Stopped up previously, the pores hadn’t been able to respire, so their tributaries had turned tail and seethed inside. Stretching the integument tight under its tamped swell, the humectation buffeted and surged against the subcutaneous membrane, as if trying to dissolve its dam. Now finally the moisture could muster, cohering into beads of perspiration. Like paratroopers awaiting the green light, they blistered and twitched at the aperture of each of the numerous glands. Finally with the surface tension now as unbearable as the mental discomposure brewing up the effluvium, they absconded. Distended globules forging their cooling runnels down the glistening flesh. Some fell prey to the tangled follicle foliage and became fatally snared. Others were beached upon impermeable vestiges of the oil. But the surviving sapper drops achieved their mission and delivered localised alarum to the recoiling flesh. Each one was eventually picked off as it evaporated, leaving only a dirty salt sediment smearing the quaking skin like dried up stream beds.

The next pressure was far more parochially located. It had been present from the onset, but displaced by other deeper piercing insistencies. Now its prod was pushed to the fore once homeostasis had regulated and relegated oil and sweat from bodily sentience. For this was the most regulatory flow of them all, the one customarily controlling waste. Its constriction was plenty fierce, but when the spill came there was not the anticipated spate. A dribbled exudation of urine rather than a gush. The discharge was warm against the flesh which served to exaggerate its imagined volume, but the laggardly flow rescaled its attributes back to a trickle. The acid tang corroded the mind’s levees as to an appreciation of what this flux portended. It represented an elongated tributary of fear. Its source high up in the brain’s troughs and crevices, fermented by the realisation and concomitant reflexive reaction to terror. This liquid release sirened that there was unlikely to be any such release. 

The final emission was the most viscid of them all. 

Again a bubbling up, but a reluctance to cleave from the arterial wellspring for all the seething. This serum was too thick to squeeze through the fissures of pores, but rather required greater gouges for its proliferation.

Pulsing like magma, finally the haemal weep was reluctantly birthed through a cleft canal. A rupture in the embankment of the skin.

The beads formed were more conspicuous than the previous deliquescences. They had burnished the horripilated flesh as they slicked along, whereas the globules of blood eclipsed the very skin beneath its deliberate overlay.

Nevertheless its course was laboured, meandering over the contours of flesh made salient by muscle flex, pausing at any hairy scrub like a tourist stopping at every beauty spot to take in the vista. 

Eventually the first drops of this metallic Nile forged its path to the mattress and stained it red as it pooled and washed up hard against the flesh scarp of the legs.

Taken from flash collection "28 Far Cries" available from Amazon

Fix Bayonets - Sunday Sample

This story was prompted by Marianne Faithfull's recounting of the experience of her Jewish grandmother and half-Jewish mother surviving the Nazi occupation of Vienna, only to be the victims of rape by the liberating Russian Red Army as a systematic tactic used against the female population of Vienna.

“Was that an order Comrade?”

The trooper shrugged his rounded shoulders. Seemed as though the muscles and sinew attached to his shoulder blades were directly connected to those in the face, as his mouth winched up into a rictus of a smile. His hands plunged to his balls and freed them from some crease within the coarse fabric of his fatigues. He shuffled off, still cupping his balls.

It was true. Our officers were exhorting us to seek some R & R and they didn’t mean taking ourselves off to Vienna’s opera houses for some high culture. Our cadres were enjoining us to remember the suffering of our families and the motherland back east. My fellow soldiers were egging one another on with lurid tales of former non-military conquests, exaggerated or otherwise. Creating that unity of purpose that had seen us drive the German army back out of our homeland and back towards the sewers of their own shattered cities. 

But each was being utterly deceitful in the intent behind their words. Our officers had turned a blind eye to when we had huddled deep inside one another for warmth, intimacy and relief in the direst of circumstances during the German advance. Now they wanted to ensure that was just a desperate exigency, never to be repeated and that we were to rediscover and reinstate our manliness as men of war. The cadres whispered how we were to degrade the notion of Aryan purity by spreading a little Slavic seed among their blonde haired, blue eyed women. Our soldiers, well they would never admit it, but they wanted to purge their self-disgust at the embrace of last resort they had indulged in when they thought their number was up.

I couldn’t fathom the logic. Such acts would make us no better than our fascist foes. They regarded us as untermenschen and here we were treating them exactly the same way. It was one thing to sprag an enemy soldier on the end of your bayonet, but you don’t also stick at the non-combatants. And so far as the males went, we weren’t going to. But the women we were to expressly target. That made them a level below, like the sub-subhuman. Dialectical materialism seemed to mean, they rape our mothers, we rape their daughters. I couldn’t see the advancement of any progress by that. How was this dick-tatorship of the proletariat supposed to establish superior socialist moral values? 

It was an abomination that the Nazis had employed the same tactic to terrorise our population back home, in order to quell any resistance and  consolidate their conquest. But here with the Wehrmacht in full retreat, there is no prospect of any resistance, our victory is uncontested by an already defeated populace. And we are to announce ourselves an Army of Liberation in this manner? 

The command was of double distaste to me. When I hugged and fondled my fellow gunner in the basement of burned out buildings at night, it wasn’t mere relief or any desperation for me. It would be an embellishment to describe it as love, but the passion and ardour on my part was not borne out of any wretchedness. Am I to forcibly take some Austrian boy to demonstrate Mother Russia’s puissance? The Nazis placed the likes of me in their death camps and I have no doubt that when the Communists are able to return to their rigid prescriptions outside of war, I would be categorised similarly and treated with equal malice. Our model ideal Uncle Joe, has made a man’s love for his fellow a criminal act. Apparently it is only a proclivity in the aristocratic and bourgeoisie. A perversion manifested by an already aberrant class. There is only one criminal act about to be enacted here and it’s by a whole class of men from our nation.


this story is taken from my 4th collection of flash fiction "28 Far Cries" published by Gumbo Press

Available in print and e-book