wb :

there are many ways
you could do this


reach out a tentacle
suckered with doubts


release pools of
dark-inked missives


school yourself not
to be so clownfish


clam up and refuse
to shell out anything


or decide it's
too fishy and give up


before you finish
counting


the waves in which
you love him

invisible launchpad
to mars; mornings ascending
with the dark skies.
this isn't rocket science,
they commonly teach.
which would've been better;
space-suits, or fire-proof
pinafores? for

gatherings under the
fluorescent lights; final
checks; what's your take-off
strategy? spacing out,
sitting down suddenly, i miss a few
good-luck hugs. but
they forgive me
and my starry nights

what on earth were we
thinking about, taking those
flights? Probably trying
for pegasus not icarus;
going towards winter
not the eternal summer of the
sun. And as we farewell through
static radio waves, floating we
lose all sense of gravity

A quiet, unassuming man, he had no family- that he would speak to me of, at least- no job, for his retirement was a cosy one, no vices that might barter a year of breath for a night of brazenness, not even a hobby peculiar to men built as him- for he was built right between the jolly, redfaced heftiness of a woodcutter, the wiry, bearded strength of a fisherman, or the stately, supple grace of a watchmaker; as he opened the door that morning, he greeted me with a pensive smile, and took my hand with his own, as wrinkled as the book-spines on his shelf, and callused as the logs that made the walls of his cottage in the mountains.

The only luxury he truly seemed to need, I noticed as I entered, was the camera perched snugly atop the sturdiest shelf nailed into wood perhaps older than either of us, surrounded by ancient books and illegible papers, yellowed as the eyes that read them, strewn across the table, and a tea set which he looked at with that indescribable melange of contrition and nostalgia; and as we had tea, he slowly turned his thoughts to laughter, and our first meeting filled many a mountaintop minute with the heartiness of two with much between them yet, inexplicably, more to share.

Then up on last of the rays of the sun climbed the night, and the sky darkened, and the fire now gave us tea, warmth, and light; and I rose, and smiled, but he smiled and said to me- "no, lassie, let me show you something now- my life's work, if you will", and then the door opened- but it was he who was outside, and I was left a- amazed, perhaps- adrift, now that I think of it- but then again, retrospect never made things clearer.

And so it was that on the first night of our meeting, he took my hand again and brought me to the top of his cottage, and the ancient camera, his singular pride, joy, and love, sat upon a tripod on the roof; then he motioned to the city that lay below us, massive and corpulent, red and radiant in its bloatedness, and he sighed and took pictures of the sky, the stars, and the hills; and though he tried his best, the lights of the city always found their glare into the corners of the lens, like- like some mere tourist gazing the camera, oblivious to the wonders that lay behind them, the light glinting of their teeth like it were some trophy of theirs.

"Behold the works of Man, as many as they are terrible", he said to me, and I could only nod mutely as he sighed once more, and started to take down the tripod; but as he fastened the last leg, there rose a terrible silence in the air, tenuous and tenebrous, and suddenly the light of a million homes went out as surely as the fire below his stove; and all of a sudden, the only lights in the sky were a million patters and a waning moon, and the only gleam that the world returned shone off the burnished silver of his camera.

In that moment, his eyes widened as a child's, and he laughed, and cried, and forgot about me, and in the glorious darkness he worked with the fervor of a man who had seen that he had spent the first three years of his life babbling and wetting himself, and that he very well might spend the last three years the same way; the tripod went up, and then the camera, and in those few minutes, a lifetime's dream came true as he photographed the night in all its unsullied glory, the glory of a million stars, the blackness of the sky, and the shadows of the hills upon a sea that whispered on the breeze; and when he had taken the last picture, he merely smiled, recalled that I was there, and took my hand another time- and he said, "please have them developed for me", and coughed his last laugh into the coldness of a night that was the closest he ever felt to warmth.

-~-
Flash fiction in 6 sentences. Inspired by the view from the mountains at Nagasaki.

the constellations of desk-lights
milky way wrappers,
fallen comets,
multiply like
efficient mathematicians
biologists who
have just discovered the secret
to life.
if you were looking
for evidence of the big bang
it is right here
underneath some bars
of galaxy and inertia
too.
tomorrow's asteroid
comes nearer
like the swimmers in
the slow lane
kicking up water
fuelled by chocolate
trying to fit into
orion's belt.

i need to learn
loneliness
picking blueberries
amidst the Isle of
Langerhans;
digesting


them as i go along.
above are cloud-boats,
menancing like
thundergods.
should i make oars
of prickly, dark-


staining bunches
or wait
til the blues
have been
absorbed into the
lapping waves
like friendly rocks

He had told her to wake him in a thousand years or when it was safe, whichever was later, as he closed his eyes and laid on the white sheets on a steel bed in a cocoon of black; perhaps her aural sensor malfunctioned in that instant, or her processing core misinterpreted his intentions, for when he next opened his eyes, it would have been a million years.

All too quickly passed the first fourteen years, but while the people had long since forgotten the old days of hunting and warring, their governments had not; and so it went that while children played in pristine virtual-reality beaches and their parents enjoyed every conceivable pleasure in the synsation chambers, their leaders rose and fell like the tides of a time when the moon still possessed most of its mass, and their factories sowed the seeds of things only he would come to know of, and only for an instant.

As his shell hummed and whispered, forgotten in the basement of a home ruined by time, his family's rusted bones adorning the stainless pipes, the day arrived where man, blind with pleasure and deaf with ignorance, chose his future for himself, and picked the road paved with thorns leading to perdition; in the wake of the first bombardments, nobody was left standing who remembered who fired first, and as man strode the lands of his dominion and left the smell of regret lingering in the wake of victory, the pride of Mankind was torn as the hair from the few who survived as they beat their chests and wailed in torment.

Then it came that countless years later, as a village was digging for a well in the desert wastes of what remained of Southeast Asia, they struck a coat of ebony that even their strongest warrior could not break though he shattered his prized stone axe, and the medicine woman declared it the Devil and unbuddhist, but the elders called it a relic sent by the gods Elohim and Vishnu, and the tribe venerated the sarcophagus as readily as they held in awe the bones of their ancestors; and as they searched the world and grew stronger, they found more of the sacred relics, and they founded the first of the last civilizations of Man in the wake of what few remembered as the Flood.

One day, in the heat of winter, an archaeologist wiped the sweat off his forehead and adjusted his lead suit, and shouted for his assistants to come, and, awestruck, mouths agape, hearts pounding with sheer incomprehensibility, they beheld the zenith of all the works of Man, and they worshipped it, and they brought it to the Sister City at the other end of the world, declaring it a prize as worthy as the Cocoon of the Maker; the last elder knew what it was, and shouted and coughed his blood up in the comfort of his hospital bed, but the doctor simply shook his head and gave him an injection to put him to his last fitful sleep, and drove his nurses in his car to witness the unveiling of the priceless artifact with markings only two men alive knew how to read, both of whom were asleep, and both of whom never would witness the awakening of the relic whose title its makers bestowed upon it was World-Killer.

And then in the rain of dust and echoes he woke, and he kissed the vacuum, and it took him into its embrace; and that was the end of things for the race of men.

-~-

Flash fiction in 6 sentences, idea stolen from ZH.