[x]

On Identity Doubled In the old days, which means when my identical twin and I lived in the same state, we were often asked, "What's it like to be a twin?" At age twelve, I got tired of that and answered the question with a question, "What's it like not to be a twin?"

Good question. My sister and I were born about six years after our one sibling, so I was the "baby" in our family by one minute. The age gap between our older sister and us also made us ever more a firm two-some than twins from larger and closer families. My twin and I were called "identical mirror twins," which means she's left-handed and

FFM XXVIIIf she screams the loudest that means she cares the most. Beneath her weak chest, her heart palpitates and her lungs expand to the point of near eruption. She waves her hands and stomps her feet just like everyone around her, shaking the floor with the weight of a thousand booming steps.

Now, if only he would look at her.

The Hour-What would you do if you only had an hour to live?

-Huh?

-You heard me.

-Well... I guess I'd call everyone I love and tell them how much I care. Then, I'd... I'd sit down and spend whatever was left with you.

-How sweet. But really, what would you do?

-First, we'd have amazing sex. Then, we'd have mind-blowing sex. Then we'd have sex that showed us that there really is a god. After that, in whatever time I had left before the end, I'd post a Facebook status telling everyone how much I love them.

-That's a bit more honest. Now, what if after this hour was up, you just went back to the beginning of it like nothing had happened, but you w

May the lion lay down beside the lamb.Like the lamb hiding from the lion, I speak carefully not to disturb you. Tip toe around the gates of your feelings, I want you to understand the nature of my words. Like the lion to the lamb, you're so quick to lash out. Much too concerned with your own perseverance and needs to consider mine. This love took me through the clouds of depression and left me sitting among the stars, reveling in the view of the beauty you brought into my life. How is it that the thread I was hanging by so tightly could have snapped so suddenly? No sign of fibers splitting, no sign of our love receding. A lamb as frail as I couldn't dream of rebuilding a bond so

missingyou wrap me up in ocean water-born smoke of the midnight aegean seas, the misty wisps suspiring into my ears as your sweet serenade fingers trail sonata whispers down and around my ribcage. these shoulders of hundred-mile journeys should suffice for the safety of the norway fjords. your fingers trace the trembling arteries down my arm and linger at the mass of veins at my wrist, sweeping sadly over the harsh remnants of selfish black nights.

some days, i wish you were heartless too.

life is supposed to be good; i wish i could make yours better. december nights are for people together. you are warm but sometimes it's just hard. i push you aw

WastesShe kept walking into the wasteland. A tall, lean wolfhound trotted at her side, keeping her company in the endless emptiness. She had no other companions; she had seen no one else since she crawled out of the cellar a year ago. Her leather pack, scuffed and dusty, tapped a cadence on her back. An equally empty canteen banged hollowly against her leg. Her knife was honed sharp, but she hadn't seen another living creature or water in three days.

She only knew three things. She needed to go west, and she needed to feed both herself and the dog.

And she was alone.

A shriek made her look around. Far ahead, a hawk circled in search of dinner. S

Handle With CareSomething broke today.

Something small and precious, a glass flower, a snowflake, a heart. Something untouchable for its fragility, something broken much to easily, never to be healed again. It made no sound, no dying screams or pitiful whimpers, its passing was slow and barely noticed, noted only by outsiders with jaded eyes. It's gone now, spirited away and never to be seen again. Earlier and earlier it breaks, shatters, and falls away spreading itself across the floor and cutting the feet of everyone who walks upon it, unaware of the blood pouring from their bodies, slicking the shards and staining pure white red.

Something broke today.

Babydolls and RacecarsDear Rosie,
I have your baby doll. Give back my racecar or she gets it.
- Tommy

Dear Tommy,
Don't you dare hurt my dolly. Racecars are stupid anyway.
- Rosie

Dear Rosie,
Baby dolls are stupider. So I threw her off a bridge.
- Tommy

Dear Tommy,
Mommy got me a new baby doll because she loves me more than you. So there.
- Rosie

Dear Rosie,
I don't care. Daddy took me out for ice cream and then we went to the park to play catch.
- Tommy

Dear Tommy,
I don't like ice cream anyway. Mommy takes me shopping for pretty clothes and to get my hair done all the

The Dream-Makers The clouds are beautiful today.
I watch them from behind someone’s eyelids as she sleeps beneath a tree with a book in her lap. For a while I imagine the way the trees must feel as the breeze sways them; I have not felt a true breeze in so long. And then I turn back to the depths of the girl’s mind and carry on with my work. After all, dreams do not create themselves.
I don my black shawl and turn to the little dream form of the girl. Falling into my character, I cluck my tongue and point at the forest that materializes in her subconscious. “Beware the monsters that live within the woods, my dear.”
“But

For My DaughterDear daughter-I-do-not-have-yet,

You will be my perfect. You will be my proudest moments in one small person. You will be made in love, or maybe anger, or maybe even desperation. But that won't matter. What matters is what you will be made into.

You will have Daddy's hair and his nose, and my eyes and my smile, the smile that happens not because someone with a camera told you to, but because you're genuinely happy. But you will have your very own heart and will be full of all the things that give you your you-ness. Whether you sing in the bath or make Valentines for everyone in your class or give your last homemade chocolate chip cookie to

The Man in the Coffee ShopThe man who works at the coffee shop looks like you. I noticed this some time ago and have since frequented the place. He recognizes me now. He smiles at me when I come in. His smile even looks like yours. He doesn't say hey though- you always said hey.

I still work at the library even though you're not there.
Sometimes I look over to your desk and expect to see you typing at your computer, but someone else is there now. It's not you.

Sometimes someone will come in who looks like you. Maybe he will have the same hair, same stature, same profile, same laugh, same voice. It's never been you.

Sometimes I drive myself crazy. I pull at my hai

FFM XVIIt's only me left. I wish it could have been something cool, like from a sci-fi novel. In the end I would be saved by some kind-hearted scientist who manages to make fast-growing saplings from my seeds and then repopulate the entire grove. But this is not a sci-fi novel, and there will not be a happy ending.

Half of this grove was gone with the sound of heavy machinery and a deafening crack of dry wood. No one put up a fight or showed any resistance to them. Trees don't cry. Not even when someone says something mean to them. Not even when they are lonely. Not even when a bulldozer runs them over.

I hope that when they do come for me, they w

FFM XXHe arrives here at the same time that I do. He waits outside the building for the doors to open, raising his sun-weathered hands towards the sky in some sort of meditation ritual he himself made up. Once the library unlocks its doors, he says hello to the staff and takes a seat by the window. His seat. He opens up his bag of things; a jar of water, his reading glasses, a notebook, and a pen. He goes to the stacks and pulls out a children's dictionary and whatever book he plans on reading that day. Today, it happens to be about Marine Biology. He sets up the scene, notebook in one hand, pen in the other.

His sanity must have gone years ago. I

FFM II"Dreams are the best liars, they always know exactly what you want."

"What makes you say that?" he asks, not looking up from the glow of his phone.

"Last night, I had a dream, and it was raining, storming, with lightning flashing through the sky and thunder booming so hard it shook the floor. I was in a store, one kind of like Walmart, and there were no windows or doors. And if I had thought about it, I would have realized that it was a dream."

"What do you mean?" he says, with the click of his iPhone.

"Well, if there were no windows, I wouldn't have seen the lightning, right?"

"I suppose not," he said.

"But then, I remember I was goin

FFM XVOf course it was wet, it was the 1800's!

No one could remember when the rain started, and no one could see it stopping any time soon. Rain collected in buckets, gutters, potholes in the street. We learned to live with it as everyone else had done for years. It did wonders for the city's rat population (which I hear took a sharp downfall when the rain first started), and if it weren't for the mud, it might almost be bearable.

I, however, had grown sick of it. There were only stories of sunshine now. Stories told late at night by my grandmother, or re-told with glorious anecdotes by my brother.

There was really nothing that I wanted more tha

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Day ThreeI have turned myself
into a cavern.
Pulling so hard,
that I can hear the seams
crack beneath my fingers.
I ask how I
can bleed myself dry
before a sea of faces
I will never see again
and I wonder if it’s worth
the way my bones rattle
beneath my skin
as I fight to stand straight.

Day TwoAt night I coat my
lips and thoughts
with Vaseline
hoping that they might
both be softer in the
morning.

I worry that
kissing
and sharing secrets
will both end with
your blood on my hands.

Day One

I hear singing
between
the spaces in the rainfall.
I open and close
my lungs
to the rhythm of the wind’s
heartbeat, swallowing fistfuls.
(I swore for a second,
that I could hear your breathing,
but it seems I’ve forgotten that too, love)
I thought I loved the rain,
because it was so much
louder
than the snow, and I could
drown in the streets
without so much as lifting a finger.

JanuaryI. When my brother was expelled from school, I cried for a week. I lay in bed thinking about the poor boy he bullied so relentlessly that he couldn’t escape, even when home. I thought about the relief he must feel, now that he is gone.

II. My mother kept a calendar from his school on our refrigerator. Stoic faces of boys representing years of prestige hung above words from a God they did not think twice about.

III. When he did not think I was looking, I saw remorse dripping from behind his eyes. When he looked at me, I could not look back without seeing the faces of the kids from elementary school and remembering the crushing weight o

LiminalI woke after thirteen hours of sleep
and when I looked in the mirror,
there were still bruise-purple
crescent moons beneath my eyes.
tired no longer comes from a
lack of sleep—it has reached a state
of permanence, engraving itself
into my bones. When you ask
how I am, I will now answer:
cold and tired.

It was later that night when I
tasted the liquor cabinet
to see what all the fuss was about.
Whiskey burns as it goes down
and settles in the cavity of the heart,
encompassing it with a hug
that a lover will never reach.
I now want to know if I will
ever be able to melt.

I used to close my eyes beneath
the night sky, as everything i

Changes Due"See the way the top of the building blinks?" he asks, pausing to breathe some warmth into his stiff fingers.

"Steady blue, clear view.
Flashing blue, changes due.
Steady red, rain ahead.
Flashing red, snow instead."

We stand beneath Boston's skyline, the February sky spite hard, tiny flakes that don't even feel like snow at us. I begin to wonder if we are trapped inside a snow globe of the city, as if someone bumped the one that I bought for my grandmother when I moved here.

"Changes due, what does that mean?"

He shrugs back at me, "The guy who wrote it probably just needed something to rhyme with blue."

I pull my hands from my coat poc

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FFM VI (The Astronaut)

by ~xthe-eleanorx, Jul 6, 2012, 8:07:12 PM
Literature / Prose / Fiction / General Fiction / Flash Fiction & Vignettes

^{I've always liked astronauts. There is a strange romanticism attached to someone who finds the entire world so mundane that they feel compelled to leave it behind. (I hear that the word mundane means "earthly." Figures.) They need more. They need the universe. They need everything that ever was and ever will be.

My husband is an astronaut, and as a child, I wanted to become one too. I could leave my little world behind. But as I grew, my little world also grew, and I realized that there was more than enough to explore and discover on this planet. I had my love, the astronaut and we lived in a tiny, little house where I played wife and he played husband. My world was little again, but it was perfect.

But of course, he had to suit up and take off. And I got left behind.

Most nights, I sit in our my garden, and look up at the night sky. I watch the stars and know that he is up there, flying among them and I wish for them to bring him back.

And I know that this world will always be mundane, and I will always be left behind.}

FFM VI (The Astronaut)by ~xthe-eleanorx

Literature / Prose / Fiction / General Fiction / Flash Fiction & Vignettes

^{"I will gladly stay an afterthought, just bring back some nice reminders."

Today's Flash Fiction is inspired by: [link]

God Amanda Palmer is brilliant. She and Neil Gaiman make my list of favorite couples.

How is the pacing of the story in comparison to the length?
Could/Should I expand the story to make it longer?
Thoughts on the parenthetical statement in the first paragraph, does it distract from the tone of the story?
Other thoughts/comments?}

~cristinewakesuphappy Jul 13, 2012 Hobbyist Writer

^{verdict:

my new short story (flash fic). i wish i thought of this or were the one who wrote this. congratulations...}

~xthe-eleanorx Jul 13, 2012 Student Writer

Thank you so much!

~cristinewakesuphappy Jul 13, 2012 Hobbyist Writer

^{you're welcome.}

~WaKip Jul 7, 2012 Writer

I don't feel it needs expanded, it was short, sweet, got its point across, and was beautiful. It actually tugged on my heartstrings, a great feat for short stories. Awesome job, please don't stop making these, I've loved or at least liked every one of them so far

~xthe-eleanorx Jul 7, 2012 Student Writer

Thank you very much! FFM only lasts until the end of July, but I do enjoy writing flash fiction, so there will probably be more in the future.

=SilverInkblot Jul 7, 2012 Hobbyist Writer

The pacing is just fine - but I always kinda loved bite size stories

I don't really want to see any expansion; I think you've said what you needed to and that was enough. Too much musing would dull the impact and start going over into angsty territory.

I like the parenthetical statement; it goes with the rest to me and is a nice little aside.

I don't have any criticism

~xthe-eleanorx Jul 7, 2012 Student Writer

Thank you very much!

=SilverInkblot Jul 7, 2012 Hobbyist Writer

Of course

~PoorEccentric Jul 6, 2012 Student Writer

Wow, that's just amazing. The first paragraph sucked me in with just how beautifully it talked about leaving the world behind.

And then it got even better because in the second paragraph it almost felt like I was growing right there with her. I'm sure everyone starts off wanting to leave, but then most of us realize the world is big enough in it's particular smallness that's just right for us, and some never let go.

And the ending was just so bittersweet and perfect. If I could fave this more than once, I would. Very good job.

~xthe-eleanorx Jul 6, 2012 Student Writer

Thank you very much!

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