Everybody's Reading | Flash Fiction from Karen Schindler

The Everybody's Reading Festival kicks off in Leicester this week and to celebrate the lovely Karen Schindler (from mentor) has agreed to me posting some flash fiction here and over on the ER blog (later this week). So with huge thanks to Karen here are a few of my personal fave's of her Flash Fiction collection.

Hardboiled ----Flash Fiction

Non smokers taste wonderful; clean and like soap, or salty with sweat from an honest day's work. A smoker tastes bitter, yellow nicotine oozing from every pore. His tongue, skin and cum all yellowish and sharp on the palate. But they're easier to catch, what with all that wheezing while running.
And afterwards, when you cut off his smoking hand and boil it in a pot, the water turns saffron, filling your lovely lair with the intoxicating reek of the addictive pacifier of the masses.
My landlady objects to the smell though, so sometimes I throw in a little tarragon.

Avast my heart -----------------flash fiction

Sandy had been having the dream since she was five years old. It always started the same way. Looking down at her bare foot as she stepped onto the deck of a huge sailing ship, masts and rigging creaking in the wind, salt spray on her face, the smell of the ocean and its deep mysteries surrounding her. There was a boy at the helm, his dark hair blowing in the wind, his face alighting when he looked up. He would hold out his hand to her and say something, but what he said was always muffled. She’d take his hand, stand next to him at the wheel, hip to hip, their hands steering the ship in unspoken unison, both of them rolling and swaying with the crash of the waves as they sailed together on an endless moonlit night into unknown adventures.

As she got older she had the dream less. College, career, marriage, children, grandchildren and then on to the aching sad hollow of widowhood, all progressed one into the other in the usual fashion.

Over the years, Sandy wrote poems and stories about the dreams. Sandy confessed that the only published poem of the lot was her favorite. Her husband, several of her friends, and each of her children could recite it flawlessly:

I met a pirate in a dream...

Circles of plundered
gold and jewels
in his ear

Callused hands
tough yet tender
of a knowing craftsman

Sinews like well oiled teak
beautifully touchable

Hungry lips and dark
eyes full of longing

Emboldened with love

To pierce and
avast my heart
--

This night the dream was very different. Sandy wore a curve hugging, swirling dress of white, diamonds sparkling in the fabric. Her bare foot touched the deck just as the sun was setting; its pink reflections turning the waves and the sails into tapestries of color. The boy was a man. He looked up as she stepped her bare foot onto the deck. He crossed to her and took her into his arms kissing her like a man starving.

She smiled and said: “What is it you always say?”

He looked at her, searching her face with his eyes, running his hands over her back, his face lit from inside with the joy evident in his smile.

Golden light streamed from his fingers. He put his palm to her chest and said Avast.

Sandy woke up.

--

“Father Davis? Stephanie Peters, I hope I didn’t call too early and interrupt your breakfast. No, I’m fine, thank you……it’s Mom, she passed in the night. No, it hasn’t quite sunk in yet….she looks so peaceful, quite beautiful actually. Yes, a simple service. Everybody should be able to be here by tomorrow. No, not a burial. We’ll rent a boat and sprinkle her ashes in the ocean. Mom always loved the ocean.”

Alien in my tea

Otherworldly CompanyThis morning there was an alien in my tea. I was startled to say the least. He looked friendly, so I didn't have the heart to pour him down the drain. I scooped him gently out with a spoon, placed him into a glass bowl so he could see the world around him and left him to his own devices.
My toaster objected.
He said, "None of those in here, missy, you'll be sorry."
But I told him to mind his own business. I rule my kitchen.
Brebax 679 told me so.