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. 

Bleed For Me - Flash Fiction

Cascading blood occludes his wound from my gaze

Scrabbling with my hands to excavate the crimson glaze

Two ring fingers stumble into the crevice of the gash

Now it’s my very own flesh veiling the slash

I bring the bloodstained tips up to my lips

Flick out my tongue like a skittish thrips

Wincing at the cupric sting salted mix 

Elliptical drips floor splash sero-eclipsed

The weep has ceased

His soul finally released

I rake his trunk up to my breast

Clench him fiercely against my chest

The glutting blood abutting my chemise

Blotting an etched scarlet frieze by degrees

Singularly my overhanging cornice so engraved

My navel neath twin promontories unscathed

I demand to match the exact contours of your wound

Attune you to see why my blade had you harpooned

How very dare you withhold your pain self-seeking
Matching weddings rings demand we share everything

Tendering Her Resignation - Friday Flash

She gingerly lifted the soiled bandage from her shin, but still her mother winced with the discomfort. Even the faintest friction from the lint must have caused her pain, while the sting of fresh air inroading against the denuded skin could only ratchet up the agony further. She glanced at the bandage and saw the telltale red corona imprinting the white cotton. She averted her gaze and for a moment commuted it in her mind's eye as a white napkin bearing a fresh lipstick kiss before a date.

She refocused her vision and saw that her mother's ulcer was weeping again now that the compression bandage had been lifted. She started massaging her toes for her. It was the closest locus away from the wound she could caress without prompting further suffering in her mother. Tears were welling up behind her own eyes.

Gazing upon her leg it seemed as though the sore was boring through the layers of skin. But she knew the opposite dynamic was at work. Failings in the blood supply within, had starved the skin of oxygen and thereby corrupted the integrity of its tissue. A parochial suffocation.

She tore her gaze away from the suppurating wound and instead scrutinised the veins and arteries around her mother's ankles. The red and blue capillaries were raised right to the surface of her skin, like oxygen starved fish in a waterhole receding under a fierce orange sun. The reds and blues put her in mind of a road atlas, the major trunk routes and motorways out of the city. A spaghetti nexus of escape arteries that she had never taken. Held here in place by her mother's immobility and venous constriction. Her mother splayed out on her bed there, like a catafalque. Yet it might be she herself having her coffin drawn along by hearse to the cemetery at the city limits. Her body undertaking the longest journey of her life and breaching the confines of the city only once in death. As she disposed of the soiled bandage, she apprehended that it could never be lipstick, only ever blood and purulence.

It hadn't always been like this she was certain. She had seen the family portraits. Delicate colour photos sweated behind the dividing wax leaves of an old fashioned album, that suggested it was consonant with the days of sepia tints. But the evidence was still there in place. A porcelain skin so alabaster white, that the lens managed to pick out the filigree blue veins in all their delicacy. Her mother had assuredly been a beauty in her youth.

But that white skin was now bruised, burnished and livid out of all recognition. She wiped the moisture from the corner of her eye with the heel of her hand. She didn't want to get any germs on her fingers that would soon have to reapply the bandage shroud. But her good intentions were undone when she reflexively scratched her own lower leg, bringing her skin up in a chalky sheen, though there was no eruption of any efflorescence.

"Hold on Mama, I have to wash my hands clean."

As she squirted the antiseptic soap into her palms, she mused on whether the condition might be genetic. Her mother had been invalided for as long as she could remember. Certainly at an age younger than she was herself now, so that it seemed unlikely to be stalking her own vascular system. And yet her circulation had also furred up, since she rarely exercised save for errands after fresh food, clean bandages and repeat prescriptions.

Anti-septic was right. She had allowed herself to be contaminated by the stasis of her mother's plight. Caring and tending had made her utterly dependent on her mother's stagnant rhythms. She was actually the sore and her mother the lint pressing her down. She didn't mean to, but when she applied a new bandage, she pushed it with a bit more force than normal. Her mother cried out.

"I'm sorry Mama, so so sorry."



taken from the Flash Fiction collection "Long Stories Short" available on Amazon Kindle free to download 3rd-7th June