Flash Example 1

(This is a flashed piece written in about twenty minutes. A once-upon-a-time writer friend that I was sometimes eager to impress was running a workshop for writers new to flash fiction and she posted up the prompt 'Tattooed With Mermaids'. I stumbled across her post and wrote this for her.)

TATTOOED WITH MERMAIDS

He didn’t like the sea, not really. Was sick on boats and couldn’t swim, that’s what he said.

Same as fishermen, I told him. Some of em don’t swim. I know, it don’t make sense, but I heard that.

He was nodding, a glaze to his sea-blue eyes that told me he wasn't really listening. But he was interested. Not in the things I had to say, but in me. He kept his hand on my waist, under my top, his fingers stroke stroking the skin.

So if you don’t like the sea, why? I asked him.

He shrugged.

His shirt sleeves were pushed up to the elbows and he was tattooed with mermaids, inked in blue and green with red nipples and coiling fish tails. There were dozens of em, swimming in a shoal, from his wrist to the shirt cuff, and disappearing there, up the rest of his arm, maybe.

I seen one before, or two, sitting proud, hands in the hair and breasts thrusting, like girls in magazines. But this was different. He had a whole sea-catch of them, like he had sunk his arms in a bucket of fish, right up to the elbows, and they came out covered in the silver scales of cod and sardine, and no skin to be seen, ‘cept the backs of his hands and his fingers.

How many?

He couldn’t say. Got em when he was drunk mostly, and he was drunk a lot, he said, his head swimming, the ground tipping and all sense drowning. If he flexed his muscles they moved, some, like they was in water, the way things seen through water change shape, rippling.

Don’t you ever fancy something else, like a heart with a sword through it? I seen that on a man’s arm and a curl of ribbon unfurling across the red with his girlfriend’s name written on it, only she wasn’t his girlfriend no more, just someone he fucked, used to.

He laughed at that.

If you was to guess, how many? I said.

You could count them if you like, he said, finishing his drink. It felt like a line, when he said it, one he’d use to catch other fish than me. I got mermaids swimming all over, he added, and winked so everyone in the bar could see, and kissed me on the forehead, like I was a child.

He was right about all over. I stopped counting at a hundred and ten, not sure if I had counted some twice. They were everywhere. Twisting into every pouch of him, pooling over his chest, and across his back, no two the same, their tails flicking every which way, some swimming towards his neck and others diving down into his shorts.

Jesus, I said. He was passed out on the bed.

Aside from the mermaids, he wasn’t much of a catch. His name was Lou or Lewis. We drank him towards another two inked bare-breasted fish tails, fucked once, and then I moved on, to deeper waters.