October 2024 Flash Lit 6:2 - Stuck in Their Hair

Zell sighed.  What a mess.  It was going to take forever to clean it up.  Even longer, if she didn’t get started.

Fine.  For the moment, she would ignore the disaster that was her hair.  She plucked a basket of fruit off the floor and put it on her table.  Ditto the cat food and the newspaper.  There was a scattering of junk mail, mostly promoting events Zell wasn’t going to go to or products she didn’t need.  The cat himself had made a nest in the clothes freshly back from the laundry.  He was affronted at being evicted.

 

“Go ahead and tell the old hag,” Zell said.

 

He stalked off, tail high and disdainful.

 

“Now,” Zell said to herself, “I just have to get the rest of this stuff out of my hair.”  She surveyed the tower room crowded with yards of tangled blonde hair.

October 2024 Flash Lit 6:1 - Stuck in my hair

“Is the spring stuck in your hair, or is your hair stuck in the spring?” Cece asked, her eyes sparkling with mischief.

Tess whispered, “Just fucking help me.”  This Pilates training course was not going well already.  The last thing Tess needed was for the instructor, always cool and smooth and graceful, to notice she’d got her hair tangled in one of the trap table’s springs.

 

Cece put her body between the table and the instructor and grabbed the heavy spring on either side of where Tess’s hair caught.  She yanked like she was opening a Christmas cracker, the coils of the spring released Tess’s ponytail, and all was well.

 

“Exhale as you extend the leg,” Cece said loudly as the instructor approached to see how this pair of students was doing.

 

Tess obediently let her breath out and pushed the bar up against the resistance of the damn spring.

October 2024 Flash Lit 5:3 - Hand over Hand

Hand over hand,
muscles stretching
and groaning,
the held breath:
the only way out
of the quicksand.

October 2024 Flash Lit 5:2 - Hand Over Hand

“See,” said Hal, “all you have to do is double your bet and add a little every time you lose a hand.  That way, as soon as you win, you’ve recouped whatever you’ve lost and won some, too.”

Matt snorted.  “You’re not very good at math, are you?”

 

Hal eyed Matt suspiciously.  “I’m good enough,” he said, and rubbed the back of his head.

 

“How many hands do you think you might lose in a row?” Matt asked.  “Ten?”

 

Now Hal rubbed his upper lip.  “Well, maybe, if things don’t go well.”

 

“If you started by betting $2,” Matt said, sounding just like a textbook come to life, dry and condescending.

 

Matt shifted.  “I was thinking more like $10,” he said.

 

“Stick with me on the $2 for now.  We’ll also leave aside the idea of you adding extra over doubling for now.”

 

Hal said, “I don’t need this kind of negativity.”

 

“You lose the first hand, so you bet $4 on the second,” Matt went on remorselessly.  “Then $8 on the third.”

 

“I can multiply by two,” Hal said peevishly.

 

“Then $16 on the fourth, $32 on the fifth…”

 

“Still not worried,” Hal said.

 

“The sixth would be $64, the seventh $128, the eighth $256, the ninth $512, and the tenth $1024,” Matt said.

 

“That’s,” Hal sad.  “That’s not right?”

 

“If you kept going and lost 15 hands, that would be $32,768,” Matt finished.

 

Hal slumped in the chair for a minute.  Then, perking up, he said, “But I’m going to win.”

 

“Hand over your wallet,” Matt said.  “You’re not going.”

October 2024 Flash Lit 5:1 - Hand over hand

This used to be easier, Jenny thought, as she swung hand over hand across the monkey bars.  I was lighter then.

 

She pictured her first-grade self in her little white-collared dress and the shorts she had stealthily put on underneath so her panties wouldn’t show when she hung upside down.  There were a lot of things she didn’t know then, but there were calluses on her palms from swinging bar to bar over and over.  It had been almost effortless, free, rhythmic.

 

Not, however, when she was learning to skip a bar, and then, eventually, two bars.  Every time she missed and fell to the tanbark below, she heard the jeers from the line of kids waiting for a turn:  “You fell in the hot lava!”

 

Focus, she said to herself.  Here in hell, the lava was real. 

October 2024 Flash Lit 4:3 - On the Tip of My Tongue

Sweetness lives
at the tip of the tongue,
so why
do words I don’t say
taste so bitter?

October 2024 Flash Lit 4:2 - On the Tip of My Tongue

Ellie’s cold nose touched my ankle and then just the tip of her wet tongue.  Two heavy paws thumped on to the edge of the bed.  “Down, Ellie,” I said.  “I’m not dead, just sleeping.”

We did this, or some variation, over and over last night.  Sometimes she checked on Brent; sometimes she accompanied the ritual with a little whine.  Once Ellie was reassured and once we convinced her that no, we were not going to share the double bed with her, too, she resigned herself to sleeping near her sister Izzy.

 

And then, when I got up this morning, there was the thunder of paws and barking.  It was either joy that finally I would stop being mostly inaccessible or a recognition that awake I might be a whole different person.

 

I redeemed myself for this disruption by providing breakfast.  And now they are snoozing at my feet.

October 2024 Flash Lit 4:1 - On the Tip of My Tongue

 

“It’s not like there are brain cells in my tongue,” Lou protested, tucking her hair behind her ears.

 

“It’s an idiom, idiot,” Cindy said.

 

“But it’s a dumb one,” Lou continued.  “Gut feeling turned out to have some basis in fact.”

 

Cindy turned a page in the book she was half-reading.  “You’re just mad that I remember.”

 

“Remember what?” Lou eyed her sister suspiciously.

 

“That you used to say you loved people with all your heart and lungs.”

 

Lou said, “It makes just as much sense.”