The knifesharp
of a cold goodbye
is more than just a stabbing,
a flutterdown slice
to separate breath
from bone.
My safeword
is hidden
from you;
I have decided to keep it
for myself,
which means
I alone
hold both the shackles,
and their key.
Cold Goodbye
If It Came To That
A little while back, my mother’s second husband used to set little fires and blame them on me. Curtains. Carpet. Mother’s dresses. He would light tissues and drop them, to see if they could burn up before they hit the ground. He would do it outside in the dry season, once everyone was convinced I was the one who was doing it, so that no matter what, if a fire sprung up, it was me that caused it. Hell, I was almost convinced, myself.
My mother finally divorced him when she caught him in her underwear, getting fucked by the mailman.
She started giving me extra dessert every day I didn’t set another fire, assuming I was traumatized by his discovery and the divorce, and that I was somehow scared onto the straight-and-narrow. I hadn’t set fires in the first place, so it was the easiest thing in the world to just nod and smile and promise to be good, and capitalize on the loss of her second husband.
Don’t know if she’ll get a third one, but I wouldn’t mind third desserts, if it came to that.
Hail Mary
Frostbitten fingers clung to the rusted out fire escape. She pulled herself up the side of the building, panting breaths pluming in the still winter’s air. Tears had frozen on her cheeks, and she could taste blood in the burn of her lungs, the copper claws of it reminding her this wasn’t likely to go well. She swung a leg up over the balcony rail, and then shifted her weight atop it, and to the other side. Exhausted arms couldn’t hold her up any longer, though; she dropped to the landing with a clatter, and the whole of the escape groaned, shuddering. Flakes of rust snowed to the ground, and more than a few bolts rattled loose of their sockets and tumbled, spinning and plinking, down to the alleyway floor.
Before her cheek froze to the grating, she pushes herself up and looked in the window. It was dirty, but not frosted on the outside, which made it hard to look in, but meant it might still be warm.
She laid a hand against the bottom of the top sash,and the window shuddered , and gave a click. She flinched, but then reached down and laid her palms to the lower sash, and moved to lift it up, muttering quietly to herself. “Hail Mary, full of grace, help me win this stock-car race…”
Once the window was open entirely, she slipped in, and re-shut it behind her.
She realized that was a bad idea, right around the same time she realized she wasn’t alone.
Posted in Fiction, Flash
Tagged anger, apartment, cat, cat jones, catastrophe, catastrophe jones, fiction, fire escape, flash, flash fiction, grief, jones, loss, love, pieces, writing
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Now they knew
Somewhere along the line, things have grown more and less crisp, the lines between black and white blurring into gray and then resolving so that I am standing, clearly, on the wrong side. It was easier when I worked alone. The take was smaller, but I attracted far less notice, and I did not have to worry about anyone second-guessing my motives.
It was easier, but it was far more lonely, and it wasn’t until I saw the poor boy’s expression when he found out who I’d been working for that it hit home.
They knew I was a thief.
Now they knew I was a murderer, as well.
Hopefully I Will Forget
A thousand thousand years from now, when this planet is ash and dust, uninhabitable but still adventurable, they will find us in a vast archaeological dig, looking for their own history. They will search, and they will find the ruins of cities ground down to nothing, the inevitable Ozymandian future of it all leaving little in the wake of time. They will come and they will disturb our rest, digging down to seek out a vault of memories they cannot access because they are so far removed from us.
They will find us here, where we lie, and they will imagine us lovers. They will construct a history around us, King and Queen buried together. They will touch our bones with picks and brushes, and clean us off. They will find the remnants of my decorated hair, and your simple suit. They will imagine they knew us, and our motivations. Someone will take home your skull, clean it, and place it in an acrylic box, in a museum or on a mantle. Someone may make a necklace of my finger bones.
Either way, our resting place will be disturbed. Nothing lasts forever.
They will not know how this happened.
They will not know why.
By then, when all of my flesh has turned to sand, and all of my memory lives on in the DNA of the descendants of the beetles that crawled over us, hopefully I will forget, too.
Posted in Fiction, Flash
Tagged blue-eyed man, cat, cat jones, catastrophe, catastrophe jones, death, fiction, flash, flash fiction, grief, jones, loss, love, pieces, writing
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