Flash Fiction

Two recent flash fiction pieces to feast on: Indentations appears on the Writer's Talkback One Word Challenge, and The Same Air appears on Lily's Friday Predictions, http://lilychildsfeardom.blogspot.com/

Indentations

A soft glow flooded through the window and fell across her thin, shrunken arms. Her eyes had closed and the lines in her face were like a map of life, deep and full with stories. Strands of white hair lifted in the breeze sifting through the corridors.

A formidable matriarch, her voice still echoed in my mind, even though she had been silent for years. Her body had ceased to move with the slow progress of disease, yet her eyes always remained expressive, despite the dark advancing cloud of decay.

Pain came and went, eating at nerves, shunting the sense of touch into bent, clawed fingers, like gnarled branches.

Each day we would wash and sooth and feed and clean. A child trapped in an old woman, helpless in every way, she would try to talk, but only murmurs stained the sheets, thick with silver tinted saliva, but we could see in her jaded eyes what she was trying to say.

Feather pillows were her favourite, plumped each day to soften her withering body, to chase away the sores. That’s what I used.

She looked at peace now.

A soft, feather pillow in the shape of a face.

Indentations.



The Same Air

Tick. Tick. An imaginary clock; yet these sounds easily bruised the whispers coiling around the shopping mall, as though to stifle. Slow footsteps stalked, creeping in like a heavy, sullen mist.

A salt stream trickled down his face, stopped him. He blinked, somehow kept frayed nerves at an even keel.

He felt something stroke his hand and he looked down. A child’s touch.

He stared, empty. Fury would soon melt and shred skin from bones and darken the hall with crimson ribbons.

He opened his jacket. Pretty wires.

Tick. Tick.

The little girl smiled.

He smiled back. Pressed the detonator.