Fiction Friday: Mourning

Strange Weather - J. Garnett (firstplusprojects.net)

For Fiction Friday this week, I borrowed a prompt from 3 AM Epiphany, and then promptly ignored it.

The prompt, titled The City, asks the writer to write two short scenes in a cityscape of the author's choice - one at night, one in the daytime.

What came out is a fragment of an aftermath, when something catastrophic has occurred, and the citizens of the city are digging out to assess the damage.

This is called Mourning.
Flash Fiction
Word Count: 354

            In the city, there fell a soft snow of petals, and each one helicoptered down into the sleeping street. There fell a scent, also, of ash and spiderwebs, of mothwings and death.

            Those who survived the night clawed forth from the gutters to gaze out in wonder at the husk of their city. Breeze battered the lanterns on their strings, long tatters of them strewn from rooftops, across lorries, into windows, all shattered. The night that shook and ravaged had raged and passed. It cast up land, shaking blooms from the trees, raking stars from the sky, shifting plates of rock upways and sideways and down.

            Gray people with lamplight eyes, taking hold of hands, drifted silently into crosswalks. Wordless, they stared at the fallen fragments. Fire had come. Flood had answered. Waste remained.

            And life. Life clung in the sidewalk cracks, grassblades and dandelions, caked black, but alive. Pools collected in the low spaces, trapping fish and crabs in the cracks. They darted and flipped, a coruscation of scales and claws. In the high crumbling towers, redbirds dared to pierce the quiet with their songs.

            So the people crept, wary at first, and then frantic, as the pebbles scrabbled, as the first murmurs rose up. People clambered to release those entombed.

            Then noise bloomed out, cries of joy and shouts of despair. Then shifting stone. Hands clasped hands. Arms lifted and cradled. Heads tilted back, eyes to ashen sky, and tears fell.

            More fires and more cairns, these set with more care than those of nature's random violence.

            Daylight waned. Shadows deepened. A new landscape yawned into night. Those who remained gathered tight, hipbone to hipbone, shoulder to shoulder. Light subsided into smoke-skeined skies, and stars stared down, sharp and keen and unreachable.

            Quiet descended, punctured by coughs and cries. The old ones waited, wary and watchful, but the bones of the earth lay still.

            In the morning, there fell a soft rain, and each drop needled into the sleeping street. There fell a sorrow, also, of loss and exhaustion, of dust and death.

            And those who survived the night strove forward, hoping, somehow, to rebuild. 

Fiction Friday: Waiting Room Blues

For Fiction Friday, I am practicing flash fiction with this piece. Taking a prompt in The 3 AM Epiphany, this is a fiction based on a personal memory. It incorporates details from my own life into a short story of fewer than 250 words. 

"Waiting Room Blues"

Flash Fiction

by Celeste Hollister

Word Count: 249 words

Cheerful to the point of ridiculous, the Christmas tree crouches in the corner. Cartoons blare on the waiting room TV. A man and his daughter play "I spy." Another guy peels an orange. The spray fans out, golden on the sterile air. He shares it with a woman. A cousin? A sister? His wife?

I check for rings; she's got a half dozen. He grins at her. She asks how he's been doing. He lies and says he's been okay.

Then the tinny announcement sounds: Visiting hours are over.

The scuffling of feet. The hush of voices. Parting hands slide away. The lobby empties as a counselor collects each patient. The visitors wave, smile, and evaporate.

I remain. Me, the tree, and Shrek on TV.

The desk clerk hisses out a sigh.

She knows me. She is long past sympathy.

I think, Why do I keep showing up? Am I even on your list?

Then I wonder, If not me, then who? We long chased off all of our friends.

I collect my notebook, my phone, the stupid stocking stuffed with Snickers.

Yes, I still remember. So happy holidays, asshole. I guess I'll see you around.

Then I'm out in the snow and it soaks through my socks and I'm cold and I'm mad and I just want... Something.

Streetlights blur to banded halos. Cold sinks in like a demon's teeth. I go home, and I wonder, When will I decide to just leave well enough alone?

Fiction Friday: Unrequited

I've decided to start a special section on this blog dedicated to Daily Writing Practice. Each week, I'll feature the best one (or an excerpt from a larger work) on my blog. For fun and stuff.

This one is a sci-fi piece, off-prompt, that explores an aspect of love. Hope you enjoy it. If you do, please feel free to comment and share. And if you don't like it, please let me know why. 

Unrequited

by Celeste Hollister

Word Count: 455

Safe for Work

In the end, we left empty-handed. We boarded our ship and left everything behind.

I dream about you, though. Such breathtaking splendor, those ice-penciled peaks, the crystalline pools, the star-spun cloth of midnight sky.

When I wake, I smell the cinnamon-fragrant reeds that waved at river's edge. I taste the honey-cool springs that fed the lake beside which we once slept.

It's easy, now, years hence. Deceptively simple to recall your glory, to forget the heartache. Even as I write these words, I feel the twinge in my fingers, once twisted beyond recognition by the jaws of that snarling monster. Though terror struck me blind at the moment of attack, I can look back and understand. It felt threatened. It was afraid. Or maybe it was hungry. Maybe I appeared like a tempting morsel as I paddled at the water's edge. As insignificant as a worm on a hook.

Either way, it was not the only creature to shed blood that afternoon. We killed it, and others. We left a trail of bones in our wake. After all you gave us, we answered with blood.

The doctor chides me. She says I should not focus on the past, that I should turn my eyes to the present moment, that I should live second to second, breath to breath.

I did that. I tried.

But every breath here is poison. Every second a lie. How can I explain that my heart remains fixed on a world light years away, beyond the reach of any of us? When people talk of finding love, do they only mean humans, or can a person also love a place?

I have no pictures. I lost my ability to sketch. I kept not a single stone, not a feather, nor a scale. Yes, I damaged the records containing your coordinates. They called it sabotage, but if we could not stay, then no one else would find you, not so long as I was alive to prevent it.

Now in the evening, I sit upon my rooftop. Beneath me, the city boils under a blanket of smog. My nostrils fill with the oily stink of cookfires and exhaust. My skin roughens from yet another scrim of blisters. The tea I drink tastes of sweat, and I long for a mouthful of your sparkling snow upon my tongue.

A creeping deluge slowly swallows earth. We'll roast to death long before the waters claim us. There is no hope that I will ever return. But if the ancients are right, that we choose our fate upon our passing from this life to the next, then I beg for us to be reunited.

Only then will I know peace.

Only then, in the end.