Of the Day Come Now Gone

Flash Fiction

Of a village on the shore where the terraced houses step toward the sea: a giant’s staircase coarsened by sand in the distended sunlight, the light that never ends, the light that calls for great shutters on latitudinal faces—sunlight without surcease, the sun pinned to a low point in the late afternoon sky.

Here, it was warm to the skin and balmy on the breeze. Beneath the perfumes laid the smell of aloe on everyone, so given to redness in the pinkwhite. The thumbtack held firm while souls ached for it to etch the last of its journey into the sea, to bring on the stars and the reprieve of black coolness instead of the rays that baked their skin, wilted and withered them with a desert’s patience.

No answers, only arms raised in confusion, eyes bulging with I Don’t Know as the lackluster days of sunbathed sameness held court over perception, all of it running together: the halt of time while their bodies carry on with the Slow March.

Except in one of the houses, in one of of the rooms, where those betrothéd watched before open doors the perpetual motion of a Pacific still so committed to the moon, a secret held between them: their love, their role, she the day and he the night—they saw wholeness when their eyes locked amidst the vacuous circle.

In the golden light tinged with sherbet clouds, they remained as residents—new, but excellent at small talk. They melded into the fabric and complained along with them about flattened time, comparing pictures of the night.

But it was not forever. What they knew would come during all those warm days, that they held at arm’s length with an unwillingness to accept, arrives now on the horizon’s waterline: a glimmering oceanliner enlarging, with opaque masts and diaphanous sails filled with steam.

They look to one another, the last time for a long time, a gaze that finds them in the immediate of their choice that day when they halted the sky, green into brown once again—this slow arrival and the cycle it bears.

-30-

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