Tag: Flash fiction

In Living Memory

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes39 Comments

Copyright-Rich Vosa

Not like there’s a whole lot there.  It is what it is, my memory – glossy, apparently endless, and stripped bare.  But there seem to be windows, areas the light creeps in, and doorways – entries to room after room of possibilities.  If I could get in there, could move past this moment of glimpsing, find the courage to carry myself forward (or is it back?).  Remains to be seen, here – me at the cusp, in full view, just on the verge, of remembering.

What just happened?

N Filbert 2012

this post created as participation in beloved weekly Friday Fictioneers – check it out!  join!

Decisions

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Writing9 Comments

A quick response to this week’s Friday Fictioneers prompt, a quirky, multi-faceted, and wonderfully open collective of writers from all over the globe riffing their words to an image – a weekly task I am thankful for, and company I admire.  So, from the midst of this holiday week in N. America, something:

And Yet

Mom is right.  It is hard to deny that something points a clear direction, unambiguously, and difficult to argue.  But for reasons I’m at pains to reveal or explain, I am uneasy.  Seriously, I couldn’t ask for a more definite sign – but is clarity everything?  I mean, what about signals from below?  Like how I feel?  Or that strange uninterpretable “intuitive” stuff?   Something isn’t right.  As if I were standing at an intersection without a crossroad, a highway with no exits, opened out before me, shining bright.  And yet.  I have misgivings, doubts.  Troubling the obvious. Are all exceptions exhausted?  Every option foreclosed?  Pressure is on, expectations real – I’ll be a laughing idiot to choose otherwise.  And yet.  And yet.  I have the feeling it will end in a horrible guffaw.

N Filbert 2012

Elaborate Organisms (for my wife)

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes41 Comments

My response to this week’s Friday Fictioneer prompt (thanks Rochelle for the weekly work)

Her Body a Beehive

She lives.  She parents.  She paints.

She has pain.

She walks.  She sees.  She loves.

She speaks and she reaches.  She sleeps.  She weeps.

Occasionally, she laughs.

She thinks.  She feels.  She moves.  She listens.

She eats and drinks.  She works and worries.

She falls.  She goes on.  She fears.  She insists.

.

You ask me, “how? – all this!”

“Her body is a beehive of batteries – an intricate electrical network flipping switches and adapting to surge, wearing down, sparking up – each neuron, each pulse, each collective oscillation crafting her unique motricity powered with chemicals of emotion, an elaborate and interactive field of energy, an organism.”

She is.

N Filbert 2012

Myopia

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes18 Comments

for Friday Fictioneers, November 9, 2012.

 

How to describe it?  The grief is heavy, distinctly.  Regret, fear, and misgivings.  The experience is prominent, yet so difficult to explain.  Actuality gives way to traces, as if patterned into nature, something that should have been known all along, but not possible to identify.  This mix of things – complexity – the oversight of choices.  Myopia, like scales, and the fracturing, the cloud.  Peering and peering, inside and out, straining for meaning, for reasons.  Dimly opaque, only powerful suggestion, like lace over frost.

N Filbert 2012

Outside This Window

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Writing19 Comments

I struggled this week, this picture, and the myriad of life going on…couldn’t seem to find a spark.  But in the spirit of Friday Fictioneers, felt I oughta make a go of it.  So here it is – and in accord, many thanks to Rochelle Wisoff-Fields for taking up the inspirational, curatorial mantle of keeping our practice alive!

Stomps back, livid grimaced flesh flushed, shouts, more of a gritty scrape of screed: “you never…anyway…I don’t know why I ever…” huffs, seethes, jolting in a kind of place.

Unseen, steely, weight of concrete in its rage, him, silent, back there, unmoving.  Something trembles.

Wind too, perhaps occasions of rain, drizzle, precipitation seems likely, somewhere, here, somehow.

She keeps it going, it’s like a flood, like a multi-chambered dart gun, can’t seem to stop, doesn’t want to end.  Not silence.  Not distance.  Disregarding.

Something recedes, perhaps him.  Substances exiting every direction.  All wearing out.

Everything outside this window.

N Filbert 2012

To Advance

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes, Writing25 Comments

This week’s feeblish attempt at Friday Fictioneers 100-word stories…

It was never difficult to see the way, it’s the getting there that problems.  The paths unique to our movements.  We tend to think it’s the setting out – that getting going  presents the obstacle – but we’re always going somewhere.  The millions of streets and alleys, those are what throw us, what keep us from the end.  How do we know, in constant diversion?  Oh I see a way, but not the destination.  I’ll move as I see fit.  As will you.

Consider, then choose.  But always keep moving.  There’s no other way.  Keep your eye on the opening.

N Filbert 2012

As empty as a room filled with light

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes38 Comments

as prompted by Friday Fictioneers / Madison-Woods

fiction, short reads, free reads, fresh fiction, kitchen scene

How quiet the morning.  How light, though the flashlight remained still on the table.  Everything in its place, nothing to ruffle it undone anymore.  A morning in which the air had presence, its emptiness.  A sea near.  He thought to make coffee.  Thought to stir things up a bit.  Suspected  he should act or behave, carry on with routines, open blinds, crack eggs.  He could not.  Could only stand in this all-too-familiar entrance to morning, and realize.  Realize, as empty as the air filled with hazy light, empty as the counters without clutter, that where she had gone she would never return.

N Filbert 2012

Hermes

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes22 Comments

for madison-woods’ Friday Fictioneers

Hermes

If he’s bringing messages, they cut both ways, rather than thread between or stitch together.  Fleet and agile in both worlds, and neither.  They call him “the Translator,” a metaphor embodied.  He melodies one thing and harmonies another.  “Of two minds” they say of the quicksilver poet with a two-sided brain.  No one knows how he listens, but it’s clear his flight is circular.

It’s been asked if he ever stops for love, ever rests his fluid motion.  There’s never been a verdict.  First one thing, and then another.  His reaching out, a curling in.  His language an escaping capture.

N Filbert 2012

ca. 1843

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes17 Comments

Cottage. Photo prompt for Madison Woods, speculative fiction author.

from the Journals of the Claxton Brothers, ca. 1843.

 After experiencing what we’d come to call “the Plunge,” we traveled the familiar creekbed back toward our cabin.  On departing for the hunt the water flowed strong, securing our wagon deep in its tow.  It was dry now, the entire wagon missing.  And our homestead, hewn of stone, carefully plugged and plastered, now displayed gaps and cracks, with dust and moulder monitoring its decay.  Having left just hours ago at the tail-end of night, how could things have altered so?  As if ages and drought, plunder and wear all visited here meanwhiles.  Window given over to darkness, the entrance as open and vague as a ghost.

(for Friday Fictioneers, September 7, 2012)

Toronto

On By NW FilbertIn Experimenctes9 Comments

Friday Fictioneers, August 31, 2012

Toronto

How well I remember the day, injured, sharp pain in every step, alone and far, hoping for once the rain might hold.  That solid, turbulent sky.  Street smells of rot and iron, bodies and fuels.  All muffled for me in the reasons – what sense and thinking does – that thick overlay of shiftings and emotion.

It was here, right here, looking up for bearings, that I knew all was doubtful.  Doubtful I’d find my way, doubtful my body would hold up, doubtful anyone would wait or notice.  Particularly not the distant.

Of course I knew what to do.

And what about the rain?

N Filbert 2012