Flash Fiction: Roots (published as part of the Reflex Fiction Spring 2018 competition)

Roots-Flash-Fiction-by-Rachel-Malik image

Roots

What she remembers:

  1. Waking as she is lifted in her bed, gently, off the floor.
  2. Counting the time in wallpaper repeats: “Robin, blackbird, wren; robin…
  3. Falling in her old cedar bed back on to the floor.
  4. Her eyes holding her breath: she won’t blink.

Hanging on.

“Robin…

The house is quiet but outside the tree is waving, tapping.

The tree is one of the reasons she bought the house. No other neighbours.

The tree is legend, stories attach to its branches. Its hollow was sanctuary; its bark made the barren bloom. A hanging tree, the surveyor said, sourly.

Through spring and summer, the canopy reaches right up to her porch, draws over her walls and greens her light. It is almost like living in a wood. Birds sing from the hollow.

Downstairs, she drinks tea and water. The kitchen tap is working today— it makes a change.

Leaking pipes, airlocks, plumbers’ dockets—she knows better. Like her, the tree is thirsty; long ago it sucked the front wall loose and toothy. Now it has reached the house: ground floors burst, tiles cracked, her own skin flaking.

“Blackbird

She grabs a torch, marches down the path.

The rounded hollow is shoulder high. A high stink, muffled. She has never ventured her head inside. The torch finds twists of wood and shit, petrified as if a fire had once been set. Too damp now. Woody stalactites they are—one has the profile of a bird. Extraordinary. Another resembles a flower or no a cake, rectangular, iced; or, a bed, her bed, even down to the scrolling, the pillow. Don’t blink.

“Wren.

 

Read more about  Reflex Fiction, a quarterly international flash fiction competition for stories between 180 and 360 words here: https://www.reflexfiction.com/flash-fiction/

 

Friday Fictioneers: What is it?

Friday Fictioneers is on Facebook hosted by Rochelle Wisoff-Fields. You can read other stories or, better, join in and write your own at https://rochellewisoff.com/. A complete story in 100 words in response to a photo prompt.

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PHOTO PROMPT © Roger Bultot

 

This is unsettling, she thought, but art can do that.

She preferred Exhibit Pepsi, or the Virtual Visits Corp. thing she’d seen last year. That was good.

Here, the material was grey and ragged. How could anyone not know about auto-white and auto-mend?

The oddest shapes. Hollow bones? But of what? Roofs full of holes?

Much later, she remembered a story one of the elders told about birds (like dragons but real), and how there were once transports – the name eluded her – when there were great stretches of natural water: oceans.

Friday Fictioneers: Roots

Friday Fictioneers is on Facebook hosted by Rochelle Wisoff-Fields. You can read other stories or join in and write your own at https://rochellewisoff.com/. A complete story in 100 words in response to a photo prompt.

tree picture

photo prompt by Sandra Crook

She wakes thirsty, the glass by her bed is empty.

The tree is a legend, stories attach to its branches: it was a hanging tree and before that its bark made the barren bloom. Its homely scar has offered temporary sanctuary.

History in the garden – it brings in the punters. Its fame has spread as its roots.

Like her, the tree is thirsty, sucking the front wall loose and toothy. Now it has reached the house: her ground floors burst, tiles cracked. She tripped with a tray of glasses yesterday, watched the liquid dry, into the floor.

My Speeding Heart

Friday Fictioneers is on Facebook hosted by Rochelle Wisoff-Fields. You can read other stories or join in and write your own at https://rochellewisoff.com/. A complete story in 100 words in response to a photo prompt.

photo prompt by Douglas McllRoy

 

Your nails are nothing like my claws. Your heart is steady.

This is the one place you let me fly: window-lit, tree-less. Full of the tools you humans grow: pliers and torches and the ancestors of the new sound machine that sits in honour on the sideboard.

You think I am getting tamer. (‘so calm, so still’).

I am not.

You dream of flying, humans do.

I dream you leave the window open. Your fingers steal the beat of my speeding heart but it doesn’t belong in your chest. You must go rushing after it, crashing on the floor.