Flash Fiction

Clipping Dionysus

He asks for a Samson Sheer, wing back, as though a common cut for any day a god walks off the street and into your shop, his voice soft as perfume’s memory lingering the following morning, and afternoon, yet clear as a mountain spring. The sheen on his flesh a luminescence as though his every pore conspired with eye to glow off white, a marble shine, amid the myriad surrounding molecules of air, in air suspended, and thus ignite their flames, as softly as lanterns on forest edge of evening, a shine you’ve only seen in dreams, a fluency of light, now recognized deep in the mind as he turns and sits before you, locks dripping over top of the chair. One false move and you could lose your head. Forever.

Dirty Rotten Prose of Life (Novel In Progress)

Day after dawn in a wheelchair. So young. Passes still tender, circuits yet fair, border flowing ripe with song, cantinas where he would yet bite the air, devour like a 30’s novelist everything in man’s experience, his own with the rest, never torpid, never silent, nothing alien, always singing, The difference between what’s believable and what’s inexorable is as dissimilar though perhaps more delicate a measure than the distance to the nearest star or between your thumb and little finger, a span, nine inches to cast off or a cock to walk, subtract heart and lungs and whatever it is we call living a life or simply spending time among the organs, raddling around the mind of a story, a lost clause. Hospital bed. It seems quite preposterous that we should die. That the constraints are such. So blatant, dull, that roads end for real, that the body gives out seems so... obvious a device. (Authorial intrusion: What is it to truly say and believe that death’s in the nature of things? Are there people who can do this? Where do we think they are?

Channel Crossing

Boat sways. Planes falling out of the sky, few survivors, what is it to be serious? The lake long and deep, like rising from sleep, or putting your cabinet on hold while you check the mirror. A parasite is often a lively companion and will do curious things to your face. I don’t know if I want to see the future. Not even then, dig? Weren’t there towers on the banks? Either we got the wrong place or the map is playing tricks. The future lost in its own considerations, limb longing for stump, and torso, a phantom being, existence itself turned this way and that in swirls of dream. What was it, lost, can never again be apprehended? Will we ever know the simple angles of our being, how our joints are packed into time. Even if this was the future, I wouldn’t want to be here. Burning of flesh and fuel. Whatever’s sure.

—skip fox

From Skip Fox’s For To, published by Buffalo’s own BlazeVOX Books.