passion-fruit

art by Melissa Haslam

When the fruit of passion ripens under the warmth that is requital, it softens into a sickly chutney of sweet, sweet, sin; but more than that, it sows the seeds of awareness within troubled breasts.

It begins with a thought; then, an understanding. Through unheeding lips, locked in desire (no time for words), it slips past untended gates upon a bridge of tongues. Then down, down, down into throats with swallowed doubts, past dark corridors and walls of heated flesh, and into a churning sea of emotion.

We have and are had, and life is Affirmed; for a moment, hands tight upon polished shoulders, we convulse in the throes of our vision; the deed is done. Enlivened to knowledge and with regret in full blush, we leave the garden, given no longer to indifference, but to pretence.

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flash-fiction in six sentences

small consolations

photography by Zen Roxy

The ball sails through the posts as the timer comes to a halt, and young Mbassa rises to his feet upon the bullet-ridden stands as the world around him erupts in jubilant noise and colour, a single piece of human flotsam caught upon a tidal wave of exultation, the protracted conflict of his fathers forgotten, if only for a minute.

Several thousand kilometres north and across the Mediterranean, Jean-Pierre basks in the transience of a sun dog; "Gloire au Père, et au Fils et au Saint-Esprit," the vintner mutters, not heeding the harm that the early frost has wrought on his vines, but thanks it, instead, for this brief happenstance of natural divinity.

On the other side of the pond, maestro Alonso puts the finishing touches to the finale of Bernstein's West Side Story, which ends flawlessly - without loose ends from the strings or coughing from the audience, and the leads all properly dead or distraught. He drowns in the exquisite pathos of the last, unresolved tritone, an accurate representation, he remembers thinking, of the agonised non-ending that one is left with at the end of love.

It is precisely such an ending which Mr Cohen abhors, and he smiles, satisfied, as he finishes his final letter of farewell to his own lost love of fifty years. Scrawled in the crippling cold of the tenement hall, his last sentence ends with a strong sense of scansion and a perfect resolution - the way he thinks his unfortunate life of small blessings and triumphs should - and on that very night, the way it would.

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flash-fiction in six sentences

Laundry at Twelve Hundred Hours

photography by lilalena

We strung out raggedly into our files, not unlike the unfortunate lines of washing left hanging from our barrack windows - still sordid and worn from days in the field, despite the luxury of a good soaping upon our return in the morning. A little soiled, with creases and smells in exactly the wrong places, we clung damply onto consciousness, courtesy of the last disinterested perambulation of tropical rain and a full night's deprivation of sleep.

There is a call to attention - the ranks stiffen, reluctantly, like sets of drying uniforms under the unforgiving sun. A man goes limp, and drops from the line.

This is attended to with indifference by Relevant Personnel; the inspection continues.

The men are hung high and dry.

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flash-fiction in six sentences

*edit: trust Derrick to uncover my efforts at innuendo.

The Writer

art by Jinyoung Shin

He writes, but not as a writer or a poet. Yet each time he traces her name with a practised hand, there are novels to be read and sonnets to be contemplated.

When their love was nascent, he worked his art on every one of his worksheets in school, carefully – without smudges; in the wake of her flight, this he trailed clumsily in the sand with a trembling finger, ahead of a rising tide.

He writes, still, on the walls of decrepit buildings (far more poetic that way) and stolid lampposts lining forgotten boulevards, but only in the hope that his pitiful mementos may yet resurrect the dead - for she is dead to him now as he was dead to her a long time past, as frigid and still as the stale waters of deceased sentiment that lie between them. This he cannot do, but he is, at least, a necromancer; what he cannot bring to life, he animates.

Till this day, his oeuvre expands as the night encroaches; his soul decaying, his faculties undone, he writes no longer for the dawn but the absent sun.

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flash-fiction in six sentences

Nike

art by Andrea Joseph

I came to know her on the first day of school. She wore grey sneakers which sported swooshes of bright magenta.

"Just do it," they encouraged - I couldn't.

The experience was as fleeting as the others that were to come, and my few successes with her were similarly transient. I never caught up with her chariot.

To this day, I am sure that the sneakers were portentous.

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flash-fiction in six sentences

The Janitor

photography by Jeff Rinehart

I once knew a man who, whilst in search of broken pieces of time past and life lost, settled for picking up behind others. He was as wise as a man could be, acquainted to our offal as he was; what better measure of humanity than its detritus?

He was a janitor; I came to know him as a friend. For my benefit, he swiped food off counters. Unseen and unheard, he was a great eavesdropper, a Listener, if you will; he always told the best stories.

Never turn your back on a man who has the keys to everything.

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flash-fiction in six sentences

Remorse

art by James Jean

Remorse is the inspector who comes to call when you're snorting a line. In your rush to flush the drugs back into the sewage of your memory, you trip and stub your toe against emotion.

Remorse is the pale gloom of age and waste, descending upon a life which you realise you've been living for nothing. Soiled by easy sex and stained by watered drink, you've danced your youth away into the seductive maw of night.

Remorse is the boy whom you turned away all those years ago, now mature and mocking; once sticky-sweet and sentimental, then platitudinous and pleading, he offered you religion - you did not convert.

Remorse is the rack upon which one's spent soul is stretched, remorse is the unforgiving whip which flagellates the self; remorse is the punishment for living lost, and lost lives, lost living.

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vignette in six sentences

Eggs

Light begins where darkness ends, Sophie knew that much; much like how she knew that the right side of town began where Beggar's Alley ended, or how a new season had begun once the last had run its course.

But what did she know? Knowledge nestled in her mind after ignorance had taken flight, and that was a fine thing, but as soon as it had made its home, Sophie found that she knew more about what she did not know, than what she newly knew. Within the wild jungle of Sophie's young mind, to Sophie, ignorance was a cuckoo of sorts which left not one, but an entire clutch of eggs in the care of its unsuspecting rival.

An indignant Sophie then decided that in spite of all that she could learn, lest she become more ignorant than she ever was when she first began, she would try her hardest to learn as little as she could.

Little did she know.

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flash-fiction in six sentences