Flash Fiction

Litterae Mediaevales

You just finished translating a book. You spent many hours plodding through the most elusive words, all the more because it is a complex handwriting many centuries old. Through one corner you found a thin traced streak of blood, and next to it some small handwriting. "The blood is from a papercut. Cg. ADMDCI." You have kept on reading, and there is not a page where this "Cg" did not consider it his duty to preserve his opinions and his thoughts, either by the side, if they pertained to the text as a whole ("Baruch of H. said something similar in his Commentaria."), or above the lettering itself if to comment on a particular word ("unclassical use of tradere. author not trustworthy"). You had wondered whether you should translate his thoughts as well, maybe as footnotes. You did not. You close the book.

Orph.

The grass restores itself when he sings, and walls launch themselves up when they hear his voice. This was never strange. Words, to him, have always been like rocks. Upon this rock I will build, etc, but it was always a human being that was at stake. Thebes rose, fell, like a metaphor. His murderers loved his music but hated metaphor.

Room

She stops not as a figuration of human failure, not as a boulder hanging midair, Godes folded grace, keeping an enfeebled land from sinning, but as a speech-spawned beast, a phrase that's keen to breathe before the final point, a verse that breaks and binds for air yet will not dare to halt lest it would chance and rhyme. Yet goes he on to breech what customs might she follow, to wish the dame, though finer has he seen, a pleasaunt evening. She turns to him, her eyes could feign thaumaturgy by blinking, and hinting he should go where meetings may be less of tongue mayhaps, and more of long debates of glances, commends him as a fine preserver of the way, a tower with no crumbled point, no barbican to tip, no thunder-song, or lightning slice-in through his temples. A farewell bid now most germane would be.

Andrew I

Andrew has become the centre of all attentions, the focus of all photographs, the aim of all headshots. He hastes from one side of the town to the other, first by carriage and then by bike. Most of his friends are pretending to be dead. With no one to feed him, he has decided to consume his own hopes, a to-go meal he ingests as he springs across New Street through King Richard II Avenue, keeping his eyes on the menu of his persecutors, 6 meters behind him, like always. Little pay, little gain: calf muscles increase with proteins. Andrew has tried to trick them into entering the clouds, has himself jumped. His loss of 2 seconds almost proved fatal. His second loss, collapsed into the gutter, saved his life.

Andrew II

Andrew has been trying to become the tallest person in the world for almost four days. His challengers are many, his personal handicaps greater. He does not suffer from: dwarfism, short height, presumption, nanism, impossibility of growth, aquiline nosehood, lack of age, wrinkledom. He instantly became a symbol for all impossible taskers from the instant he decided to be both palm and church, to become growing stone. He has been bombed, burnt, stabbed and had statues around him decapitated as macabre blackmail (wax), yet endured it all with stoicism, brave and boring. Medusa-like, his family cried his adventurous proceedings. He cracked with the tears and grew small chess figurines.

Andrew III

It becomes one to know when to leave Andrew's company. Why just yesterday an old man grabbed his coat and all Andrew could do was whimper. Contagious cowardly abscondment his friends would slowly gain were it not for the distances between calls, the purportedly lost mail. And sometimes to walk the empty streets, full of Brandenburgian dreams, is all he knows of speech. A cat speaks to him through the dent the sunset makes in the sky: If you will walk on all fours and grow a tail, there might yet be hope for you, a rescue through feline versification that functions under the limits of darkvision indentation, of meowing meter. No, for this would be to leap the window, to curse the hand that feeds - his own, assumedly, but loyalty is where loyalty's been. And so to reject a promise will mean he'll be forced to the tundra, the dark white home. Andrew curses his own hand, and it turns to bronze. He sticks it into a mould to smelt a pickaxe, to raze whole the sin city. Poor Andrew boils with anger and melts on the pavement, is made highway fence, to watch the cars pass and stand, waiting for a roadkill.