Flash Fiction by Shome Dasgupta
Pretty Day
For instance, sunken coffins so low—right? A pretty day indeed—when gone the stems cleared from paths to create for other longings, a whisper from those beaks high above with tilted crowns and curious banter—so gathered we were, buried under a sun so sad, the sky prayed for night to cover us from sporadic waves of beams, that of which stumbled into marble caskets belonged once to broken statues. Consider an earthquake—consider and for example take view of a world’s tongue and its chorus over carved dirt where there was nothing more than just us looking into ourselves from above.
A Delicate Clef
To witness such calamitous swirls in between glimpses of perceived certitudes—so they thought and so they thought that catastrophic tendencies of nature and order were ways in which they understood. For any other silence in symmetry to cause chaos within systemic procedures, in such gentility and glance, gave way an effect of disturbed notions and sentients. Affected upon stratum and stratum in which they felt battered and however precipitated, pounded and pounded their skulls weathered, over in and over out to where each sight of sun and light they found themselves afloat amid tenuous rope—a rope of vine and illumination to where simple flights of blossomed and torn petals travel up in opposition to gravitational canon. Ripped from ripened soil and stem—with gratitude and vigorous labor, they found an aperture, a song to be held in vibration against earth’s palm and throat—altitudes in layers, sheets and swarms, they followed chanted spins of axis and tilt. Hypnotized by consistency of movement and measure, they ventured into endless halls of horizons entwined and weaved into their own lost thorns of existence—braided and clasped as if pined sepal and stamen no longer in search of desire or dirt.
Fission and Fusion I
n rain the drops sang down—fallen faces pressed against muddied windows. Who’s to say that tears knew no difference between sun and moon and the moon never turned around to look, to see that when covered in sheets and splintered skies, that we looked up for more.
A clearing: and so we looked up for more, in twilight prisms we oscillated, beamed as if the sun practiced magic and we, hypnotized, followed all laws of heat. When a day became hidden under our tongues a cloud could find its way through our pores and seep in like fog over fields.
Siblings we were.
Siblings we were and once there was magnolia before us—one we’d adventure from arm to arm, chipping bark with our ax teeth until we lost the touch of taste. Such the splendor, this magnolia, our skin eroded like history.
Then when sibling fell with broken neck—let loose the flock of redbirds, all hovered, they sang the song of sadness, such a magnolia it was, to play the harps and subtract one from the other.
Here I was alone in holy matrimony. Here I was alone, so it went, my own flock, fluttered about between the banks of my mind, I knew no more other than a whispered plea to combine sibling with me.
Up and up and up I went, a crawl upon such towering roots, and up until I became foliage, my drops of dew from my eyes, no song of sadness sang by feathers and wings, I became king of canopy and saw before me, sibling between sun and moon, and there I went, from fission to fusion once again.
Days of Sunlit Marigolds
Tier caked skies to resemble their minds—a keepsake forever embedded, they tried not to remember days of sunlit marigolds– they knew how it led to sadness. With turned heads—the other way around, clouds below, earth above—their comfort, purgatorial blessings—and so wandered these sways of past worlds of which they no longer sought. Wayward glittered breeze—fresh through, from metallic glimmer of ocean shine, they once thought earth’s pole was made of ice—frozen tears built from shadowed sorrows, such a cracked foundation to lean their bodies against. A melting—by time’s heat, steady sunset steady sunrise, one by one they go: memories to be forgotten upon rotation. And so all measures and means to let what once was to be gone and sent, they strived to look with opened eyes—easier it was, this way to block all past moons. They questioned themselves—come sun, let enter—leave light, and them, in blinding beams to discover future songs of unknown sensations. Let withered stones mold their minds, shaped and smoothened, plasticity unbound—a rising, a revolution to encompass each and every universal star, a way for them to gather and release all that had been done—to make room for unseen rings and dust. In their eyes they saw refrains drifting toward layered airs, full of need, full of dismay, full of melodic bells in rhythm with all mournings of a solar system—agony and galaxies—to relinquish and escape. So in search they hovered and flailed until legs and arms became still. It was then, when faced with nothing but their own suffering, that was when they found revealed natures of cosmos—that was when they realized a love for the world and its wishes. And so it began.
Shome Dasgupta is the author of i am here And You Are Gone (Winner Of The 2010 OW Press Contest), The Seagull And The Urn (HarperCollins India), Anklet And Other Stories (Golden Antelope Press), Pretend I Am Someone You Like (Livingston Press), Mute (Tolsun Books), the forthcoming book, Spectacles (Word West), and the forthcoming poetry collection, Iron Oxide (Assure Press). He lives in Lafayette, LA and can be found at www.shomedome.com and @laughingyeti.
Flash Boulevard is edited by Francine Witte. Banner photograph Wes Candela.
Flash Boulevard 