Flash 2

(This piece was done in a flash, with hardly time for breath or thought. I posted it unedited (as it is now) in some writerly place and an erstwhile writer colleague asked if she could use it as part of an essay she was penning about flash fiction. It was for a text book she was contributing to. I said yes, of course. Why wouldn't I? I give things away without a thought and can't really understand those who don't. It's just words, ideas, a story... why wouldn't I gift them to someone else? That's the whole point. And so I gift them now to you, whoever you are, reading this blog. I hope you might find something in what I have written, something that touches you and inspires you and makes you want to write about horses in a barn, and an insensitive father, and a woman who has dreams but dare not tell them, and a girl who is always the same distance away.)

DANCING WITH COBWEB

I am there in the barn, small moonlight breaking through a high window, the thick air warm, and the horses snorting derision. There is music playing, my papa’s fingers fluttering like frightened birds over the holes of his chanter and my mother singing at the sink, or at the oven. I can see in my head her hair pinned back, but a miscreant lock of grey falling limp across her face and her cheeks flushed and her eyes full of out-of-reach dreams. And she is singing, my papa hunched forwards in his chair, one foot tapping on the wooden floor, and blowing familiar music into the night.

And I am dancing, there in the barn, always dancing when there is music, my feet following the rhythm of my papa’s drumming foot, and me dancing in and out of the blue light of the moon, like it is a dream. And it is a dream, for I am holding someone in my arms and she moves with me, her feet in step with mine, shuffling through the spilled straw, and my hand at her waist, or where I imagine a girl’s waist to be. And I wonder if there is someone other than my heavy-footed father dancing in my mother’s head, if that is the dream I see moving behind her eyes when she sings.

And there is a girl in my arms. I can feel one small hand clasped palm to palm in mine, can smell her hair if I lean close, and the music turns us from one end of the barn to the other. And my faint heart runs breathless ahead of me, so that my head spins and the dirt-floor tilts and I fall. And she falls with me, and I hear laughter, my mother laughing And the music broken, and the horses still stamping their impatience.

And the girl’s hand down the front of my trousers then, with my hand, and there on a bed of straw in my father’s barn she gifts me make-believe kisses. And I see spiders in her mussed up hair, her breath smelling something sweet, like new-cut straw, and my own breath snatched.

And when I close my eyes I can see her, a girl I follow to school most days, my steps in hers only at a distance. Every day for almost a year now, the distance never shortened. She moves away from me and that is a kind of dance, too, though there is no music playing. And I hurry after. But though I see her plain as though she was really there in the barn and it was day, though I see her in my head, every dress she ever wore, the movement of her hair as she walks, the way she holds her books pressed to her chest as though she has dreams, too, hidden , there where her heart is – though I see all of this clear as though she is there, I do not know her name.

What you always dreaming for, my papa always says when he catches me. There’s work needs doing, and you always dreaming. Like you was a girl. You want to clear those cobwebs out of your head and see sense, boy. No dream is gonna get you a woman to cook for you, and to wash for you and to keep your bed warm.

And my mother’s eyes, still blue, filled with unspilled tears when she hears him say this. And the girl in my head, I call her Cobweb just for fun, and there in the barn, with the horses quiet again, and my father paused for breath and no music playing, I call her name and feel my body arch and the dream is warm and wet in my hand.

(PS The text book, in case you are interested, is The Rose Metal Press's 'Field Guide to Flash Fiction' and the essay is by Vanessa Gebbie)