June Flash Lit #10 - Up Against the Law

The end is near.  I have been saying it for years and it is always true.  Maybe it hasn’t happened yet, or maybe it’s already over.  It’s hard to tell, what with the physics and the psychics and all.  Time is a law unto itself, really, except when it turns into mass or energy or speed, which it does all too often, although can I really say it’s often?  That’s a time word, and thus uncertain.  But the vision, that’s true.  I’ve seen it.  The end.

It’s not about sheep and goats or wheat and chaff or left and right.  It’s not about fire or ice or even Frost and Dante and Milton.  Even John didn’t grok it with his menagerie of living creatures and horses and horned and horny beasts.

Funny thing, vision.  It’s faster than sound, but the sound is what makes sense.  The sound comes later, out of sync, and we have to piece it together with the sights like some kind of post-production engineers dubbing and redubbing.  Like knights who keep changing their names night after night.

The end?  What’s it like?  It’s the space at the end of the book, that last page before the back cover, blank, clear, light.  It’s the silence after the last period, the end of the sentence, when the sentence has been carried out and the law has no more to say.  It’s a wide, clear, glorious forgiveness stretching out into whatever it is that is left at the end.

“Move along, buddy.  You’re annoying the neighbors.  I don’t want to have to take you in drunk and disorderly again…”

June Flash Lit #9 - That Time I Knew Better

            It was the moon that did it, in all its white cold distance.  Well, the moon and the belly full of beer and the night air.  Reg knew it was just a matter of time until she would lean into him for warmth.  He had that, if not much else, these days.

            The porch needed painting, but that was not his problem.  He just rented a room in this house, a room both empty and too full.  His body was too long for the ridiculous purple couch that he slept on.  He had six boxes of books to knock against his shins, a laptop, clothes in various states of cleanliness, a pair of skis with assorted accessories, a handful of DVDs, and a three-foot stuffed rabbit.  It was what fit in the car when he drove away from Kate’s house for the last time.  Not the couch.  Kate’s new boyfriend dropped that off out of the back of his enormous pickup truck.

            The woman next to him was not Kate.  That was pretty much the essence of her, as far as Reg was concerned.  He found her slightly too soft.  She did, however, laugh at his jokes and there was a shy way she looked at him and a reflex in her to reach out to soothe his pain.

            She had her own, he knew.  And he was going to make it worse.

            She sighed up at the moon and then, as he expected, she leaned back against him.  “I shouldn’t,” she said.

            He said nothing, but he didn’t move away.  He knew better.

            Sex on the purple couch was not a thing.  They rolled on the floor under the watchful pink eyes of the rabbit.  He imagined that he was stabbing her, stabbing and stabbing and stabbing.

            He knew it wouldn’t work.  She was still there in the morning.

June Flash Lit #8 - Shades of Blue

Shades of Blue

My own eyes—

I can’t see them, except by indirection,

in a mirror that could be any color but

we call it silvery—

are blue,

blue like the sky, unless it is cloudy,

or night, or full of wind and rain,

blue like the water, except

when algae turns it green, or sand kicks

up in brown swirls, or oil slicks

the top of the white foam with iridescence,

blue like raspberry Otter Pops,

a color not found in nature and yet beloved

of small kids in baseball uniforms, also blue,

or white, or red, piped for contrast,

blue like the Easter eggs left

longest in the cup, fished out at last

with a copper loop that leaves a ring

of purple from the dribbles of red dye.

Maybe Homer would say they are

wine-dark, the Himba green, dogs, were they

to speak, gray.

Everywhere, nowhere blue.