On The Count of Three

she grabs at the ledge. Gail and Sue fall away screaming. They hit the water to the boys’ cheers. She watches them surface. “My foot got stuck,” she says, climbing back up again.

 

"Trifextra" challenge

On the count of three...

You can choose to include those words if you want, but they do not count toward the 33 words of your own.

DEATH

“Watch,” DEATH says, her pale face showing the slightest hint of pink. “I love it when they get melodramatic.” She holds her phone out to DESTRUCTION

In the video, the man’s eyes flutter open in alarm. He’s been having a nightmare. ‘Our babies,’ he says in an echoing rasp, “they were standing on the edge of a tall building. I had to choose which one to save, but then they began to jump, one by one.” He turns to his wife, takes a long breath and whispers, ‘You must look after them. Buy safety nets.’

“SPRING! DEATH! You’re up next,” the little pixie in charge shoos the two icons out of the dressing room. “HOPE, you too, go on,” DEATH hears as she swishes past. She wonders which god of contrasts thrashed out the order of the models in this Personification Charity Fashion Show. The two waiflike, fluttering beauties flank her stark white skeleton, which is draped in a solid black, über-urban hoodie dress. She slings the scythe like a purse.

SPRING, executing a flouncy pirouette at the end of the runway, pulls DEATH up short. Her smooth, silent glide comes to a clinking, clanking halt as all her bones pile one upon the other with a loud rattle. DEATH looks up, tugging at her scythe which has caught on something. She’d swung it about when she lost her footing. The long sliver blade has sliced along SPRING’s spinal cord and wedged itself in her coccyx. Rivulets of dark red stain their way down to the shiny walkway and pool with another dark red flood originating behind DEATH, who turns to find HOPE severed in two.

DEATH frees the silver blade from SPRING’s flesh with a sucking intake of air. She leans on it and shakes her head. She can hear the inner voices from the audience shouting Why them? Why now?.

DEATH looks at DESTINY standing behind the curtain on the stage.  ‘It was you, wasn’t it?’ she mouths.

 

DEATH
3 capitalized : the destroyer of life represented usually as a skeleton with a scythe

• Your response must be between 33 and 333 words.

Driftwood II

Promises tumbled out of her mouth in a glittering rush of words he could never decipher,

like sea spray breaking over driftwood to settle in a sand-filled knothole.

 

 

Trifextra 36 challenge. I cheated a little because when I saw the driftwood on the beach this weekend, I knew I had to use it.

 

http://www.trifectawritingchallenge.com/2012/10/trifextra-week-thirty-six.html

 

La Gola del Ter, Oct 2012

After Hours

Dark streets, not quite empty, echo my footsteps as I rush towards a bus because the metro has stopped. I’ve been talking to an Italian photographer about his images of other worlds.

On the wide avenue, I climb aboard a harshly lit #N14 and open my book, giddy with the evening and the wine. I look with sudden surprise, jump up and off the bus; I’ve been going the wrong way. Alone on this wide empty avenue I stand and wait. No one is waiting, no one is walking.

I step behind the bus stop, away from the streetlight, and there is a flash from the pavement. A watch with an absolutely round, white face rimmed in gold lies on its side between black leather straps. Thin black hands mark roman numerals under glass that has one deep crack running shortly between two and nine.

As I pick it up, everything goes dark. I blink, look around. The lights of the avenue are out. Windows on the buildings are dark to the rooftops, but above there is light. My eyes adjust to the big dipper. Other constellations come into view; I don’t know their names. Orion must be behind a building.

I look at the watch. I wonder whose it was. It feels like me, inoperative with no arm to clasp, pointless with no time to tell. Yet now I hold it in my hand, hesitant to try it on my arm. I give it an uneasy tap against my wrist. Is there someone somewhere missing this watch? Why have I stopped wearing one?

I stand rubbing the face, checking back along the dark road until the bus finally pulls to a stop. I can’t try on the watch -would it fit? is it mine?- but neither have I left it abandoned on the curb. On the long lonely ride home, I must decide if I need to wear this watch; whether the watch needs to be worn or not.

Collaborative prompts from http://www.trifectawritingchallenge.com/2012/10/trifecta-week-forty-five.html
where the word was "uneasy". The storyline was from National Poetry Day @poetrydayuk Twitter Poem workshop.
   #NPDLive

Blind

There's a stretch of woods along the road home. At night it can turn any odd sound into a prowling coyote, an escaped murderer or your ex-husband. You can either breathe deeply, listen for a hoot owl and whistle yourself back to calm, or you can succumb to a blind panic that will send you fleeing up the middle of the road, flat-footed and round-hipped, to pause on the other side, by the Gaffey's mailbox, hunched over and about to vomit from the stress or the effort or the thought of your ex-husband out in the woods you successfully left behind.

http://www.trifectawritingchallenge.com/2012/09/trifecta-week-forty-four.html

Three-In-One: The Big Toenail

The Big Toenail became so ingrown that it had to be removed.

For a while it became a bloody absence.

And yet, there always was a new one growing in.

Lucky Big Toenail.

***

"Describe something that is three different things at the same time. Oh, and do it in 33 words."

http://www.trifectawritingchallenge.com/2012/09/trifextra-week-thirty-four.html

 

Recyclical

First published at 101Fiction, a site dedicated to publishing flash fiction of 100 words, with one-word titles.

101Fiction "Recyclical"

Recyclical

Posed on the left pant leg of your old jeans that I wear

gardening at the weekends, you held your wings stiffly at

attention, high above the dark fuzz of your Monarch body. I

stood, hose in hand, watering the newly blooming cherry tree.

Old echoes of a sigh, a whisper, any sound that might resemble

your voice, made me close my eyes against the constant blue sky

and purse my lips. I heard only the tunneling of worms deep in

the ground as you traced your butterfly kiss across my eyelids,

and then wrapped me up in your cocoon.

  - May 2012

Recíclico

Posado sobre la pernera izquierda de tus vaqueros viejos, los

que llevo los domingos en el campo, alzabas tus alas en rígida

posición firme por encima de la oscura pelusa de tu cuerpo de

mariposa. Me quedé de pie, manguera en mano, regando el

cerezo de nueva floración. Atenta al eco de un suspiro, un

susurro, algo que pudiera ser tu voz, cerré los ojos contra el

constante cielo azul y fruncí los labios. Oía sólo el cavar de los

gusanos en tierra profunda mientras me rozabas los párpados

con tu beso de mariposa y me envolvías en tu capullo.