A wink with talons. In sunlight, it sparkles—then claws into your flesh.
13-word micro fiction written for Sammi Cox’s Weekend Writing Prompt: “Wink”
“Wink” – Sammi Cox’s Weekend Writing Prompt #344
Tag: Micro fiction
Flipping The Switch
The scariest things always come when you expect them.
Lamplight is dim in the corridor. You stand at the threshold, mincing eyelids to solidify distant, nebulous furniture, but it blurs amid the lemon luminescence. You struggle to enter or retreat.
You’re doomed. You feel it in your skin: prickly and cloying like the lusterless glow of the room.
A distant silhouette creeps towards you.
Creeps towards you and—
Like a treadmill flicked on its highest setting you fling across the corridor.
Blinding light. You soar over tables and chairs and open the hall’s door. What were you so afraid of?
Second Sight
That was the last time I saw Mom’s smile. Now when she’s near, raspberry aura envelopes my retinas. It sways like a flag in the breeze, and perpetually manifests and evaporates.
Pitying glances, consoling words. They are more bitter or more sweet now, vibrating my earlobe, activating goosebumps. The doctor’s voice is the most harsh, coarse like a splinter-laden rug. His apologies to Mom or Dad are boulders jutted out a waterfall. Abrupt, brusque, insincere.
I feel their eyes land on me. It tickles, it hurts. When they speak I drown in the cinema they draw. An unending movie plays all the time in my mind. I am the camera and the protagonist. I lose myself in the plot. In the other characters.
But when I hear Mom say it’ll be okay, the burgundy wisp returns and dwindles. Kindness of alien light warms my insides.
Slips Away
His wrists were curled onto the banister. They were weightless, a draped towel. The fluff of his palms connected with the cold metal. Despite this, hot sweat still formed on his fingertips. The fingers themselves were motionless, stale like an uneaten pretzel. They couldn’t move even if he wanted them to… He wanted them to. On both wrists his pulse pounded porcupines. He could grab the railing with his bare fingers, but after being motionless so long he feared they’d snap like frozen carrots. Had his wrists not been pressing against the banister, he would have leaned forward too far, falling four floors to his doom.
* * *
A pink sunset. Orange clouds, only a few, dotting an azure sky. From the roof he could still smell honey from the garden. The scent of tall uncut grass tickled his nostrils. He didn’t know it, but he was scowling. His forehead had relaxed into a folded, wrinkled position.
* * *
Nostalgia was his least favorite emotion. That’s why he was so dour in this moment. It felt like it could have been yesterday. There were no words in his memory. Only images and sensations. Two floors below in this very building, a large storage area. A giant flat cube, with smaller flat cubes in it. Each in a different color. An old iPhone on a table hooked up to speakers. A group, about a dozen, and himself, dancing. Fast. Stomping on those cubes, trailing off onto the concrete floor. A girl. Gentle fingers, clay that molded perfectly into his. She led him upstairs.
* * *
He could see her well now. Jet black hair that shot straight down from her head and stopped at the small of her back. Glistening off her hair was the pink light of the sun. She wore jeans and a loose cream-white sweater. Along the sleeves were perforated bunnies. She smiled wide, an invitation to ask her anything. He glanced at her earth brown skin. It radiated a warm aura. He could feel it, even from the short distance that separated them. This moment, he thought, was the perfect opportunity. To say something. Anything. What to ask her? He found himself staring at her eyes longer than he had realized. She looked puzzled. Perhaps he was not aware that he was quivering, so when he attempted to ask her what he wanted to ask her, she simply laughed him off. Or was she laughing with him? She must have expected him to say something, because he was silent for a long time, and he can vividly remember watching her smile melt away. After that, all he could remember was that she left.
* * *
He wished they’d stayed in the dark. There, they were equal. There, he felt self-worth.
Two Blind Men
Hills rose above the trees in Mt. Airy. McCallum St. barreled down from Glen Echo Rd at the hill’s top to Lincoln Drive at the foot of the incline. Despite its grand size, the slope’s drop was not abrupt for passersby advancing up or marching down the hill. Road bumps acted as safety nets, warning attentive drivers there was still some road to go until a turn onto bustling Lincoln Drive.
On either side of the incline were homes two-to-three floors tall. These houses were wide, front lawns lined with daffodils and colorful flowers. The homes were rectangular, slanting on the McCallum St. hill like homes in San Francisco.
A blind, elderly man aimlessly wandered uphill. He wore a tattered navy-blue jacket, a paint splotched puce green t-shirt and faded jeans. A warmth waved on him from the face down. It was a bright, cloudless day. Normally he’d sit at peace on a bench somewhere, but a darkness preoccupied him.
He couldn’t see. His cane had been broken in half the previous night, and the half stick he had left was not making a loud enough sound to see properly. Haphazard taps clacked off the ground as he hunched over, using a tool half his arm length.
Digital clicks echoed in a car as the driver squinted at his phone, trying to finish his text telling his wife how nice the weather today was. He was so focused that he sped over the road bumps on the hill, careened to the bottom, and hit a figure walking, causing a boom of cracked bones and torn flesh as the figure rolled onto the windshield. The driver’s engine sputtered and he veered into a tree.
The Fiction Writer 